So our New Years came about like you might expect. Tess and I were both in a miserable funk, a cold that we picked up or incubated in San Diago over Xmas. Tissues and ibuprofen were consumed in quantity, and I spent the last night of 2018 coughing, sneezing and ducking for cover each and every time one of our neighbors launched a salvo from his vast surplus of leftover Independence Day rockets.

Despite my reluctance, this year is upon me; the outstanding questing of the season is inevitable “What are you going to do about it?”

My friend who moved to Florida recently posted one of the best and most realizable New Years resolutions I’ve ever seen. She plans on going to a pro baseball game, her first, and she plans on filling out a whole nine-inning play card. That made me smile, en français bien sur. Thanks, Coco!

Truth be told, I came into the New Year already balanced on a razor’s edge of depression, so it wasn’t just sick. A lot was going on. My dog died. I’ve had a persistent and worrying numbness and tingling in my right hand, arm and sometimes face for easily a month or more. My van broke down. Add fatigue to all my other neurological bull shit. The days are really short here in the Pacific Northwest and what little sunshine there is can also be cold and wet. And man, I really don’t think I need to justify any depression given the state of the world in general. People are, for one reason or another, just plain crappy and that rides on my spirit.

So yeah, 2019 finally fell on me like a big fat boulder which had been precariously balanced at the edge by fate. Pow! Crash. The sound of dust settling. Cut to an image of Matt’s feet sticking out from under a rock.

Ides of January

And thus, the middle of the month rolled on by without me finishing this post, no oracle bothering to remind me of the passage of time.

This morning I woke up to a steaming hot cup of coffee brewed for me by a beautiful, intelligent, capable woman who happens to be my wife. Yeah, I know I don’t deserve so much, but I’m grateful nonetheless. That little seed is still struggling to break the soil of my soul, but I can feel it growing today. Gratitude is a soil building soul plant.

How to nurture that seed over the course of the year? That’s the question. I want a big fucking tree of gratitude. I want to lean on it when I weak. I want to sit under its shade when things get too hot. I want to rake up my gratitude tree’s fallen leaves and use them as compost for next winter.

Yes, I know, no SMART goals in that resolution. That is, however, how organic systems tend to work. They require patience and courage. Equal parts hope and fear.