How does one assess a year?
Human beings aren’t really built for such a process. Anyone
can tell you whether they had a good or a bad day. The memory usually stretches
enough to give you an overview of a week or a fortnight. But by the time a
month or more rolls around, you have gaps. That terrible breakfast, that bitter
conversation, or that excellent glass of beer you had a month ago usually isn’t
even a distant memory—it’s dipped over the horizon of your experience for good.
Of course, we moderns have cheat codes—smartphone pictures and Facebook
reminders and graphs that show us how the company’s bottom line trends. We can manipulate
our tools to cover those gaps, to give the illusion of temporal omniscience.
But really, how many events can you place in each month of
the last year? Take a minute or two and think about it—really think about it.
No phones, diaries, or apps to help you; this one is just between you and your
memory. How many can you name? How many can you place in the right season?
Month? Date? (The last two weeks don’t count).
How’d you do? Hopefully better than I did. In fifteen
solitary minutes of meditation, I came up with merely twelve events that have
made a sizable dent in my memory in this trip around the sun. Three hundred and
sixty-five days of experience boiled down to a dozen bones of my life.
Of those, only half could I date with ironclad certainty,
because they are born from the calendars that measure my existence: the end of
my first year teaching (May), the beginning of my second (September), a joyous
walk in the snow down Main Street on Christmas evening (December 25th,
of course), the presidential election controversy (November through…February?),
and my wife’s birthday. Three more were emotionally significant enough to etch
the date firmly—my brother’s wedding (January), a big family reunion in Texas
(August), and catching pneumonia and being flat-on-my-back ill for a week
(September). The last four are blurrier. For all the cavorting joy of finally
ending my nightly penance at WinCo, I had to ask my wife if I’d finished in
late August or the beginning of September. I’m pretty sure my sister
moved here in late spring—April, perhaps? I thought the Afghanistan debacle was
at the end of July, but a quick check of the Googles revealed that it was
August instead. And I can’t get any closer on when I finished reading Hilary of
Poitiers’s De Trinitate than vaguely summer, in spite of the fact it was
a book I’d been intending to read for three years!
No wonder we need a holiday set aside to ponder, review,
reclaim, and revisit with others; to count our blessings and look back in
gratitude. I’ve been told by others that I have a pretty good memory, and yet
of the bare dozen things I can recall of Anno Domini 2021, two of them—Afghanistan
and the Presidency—don’t even have anything to do with me directly! And yet I
know this year the Goodes have been abundantly blessed.
For the record (my own, as much as anyone else’s) let me
name some of them. We’ve got a wonderful marriage that is still wearing some of
its newlywed shine even after a year and a half. Though our births probably
would have been grimly fatal only half a century ago, we still continue to live
without even noticing our mortal flesh most of the time, as only the healthy
can do. My job pushing students toward truth is strenuous, fun, and fulfilling.
My excess pounds betray the fact that I live in the wealthiest society of all
history (and enjoy it, too!) My church and community are godly, flourishing,
and stable. There are more books to read than even I could ever get to, and I
got to a bunch this year. My family, unto the third and fourth generation, is
still present on this green earth to gather around each other—God has not
called even one of my extended family home in twenty years. In fact,
some of them live so close that we can gather regularly, share in each other’s
lives, and dwell in the thankfulness year-round. It is not much of a stretch to
say that this year might be the one I look back on as the high point of
untroubled happiness in my existence. It’s been the sort of year that people
ask what they can pray about for you, and my wife and I glance at each other
and come up with something tiny and banal (lost TV remote, say—I would still like
to know what happened to that thing) out of sheer embarrassment for how blessed
we are!
It makes me a little nervous. Lady Philosophy wisely told
Boethius, “Good fortune deceives, but bad fortune enlightens.” I may not be
very enlightened after 2021, but I am deeply grateful to the God who gave me
all of it, right down to the unhurried breath I snag as I write these words. I
may not remember it all, but I thank the One who gave me all of it. I hope that
will suffice.
Here’s to the year that has been, dear reader, as well as to
the year that is to come (and all that comes with it). May your memories of
good days and bad last you until another Thanksgiving rolls around.
