The dawn of a new year brings the best and the worst: promise of new beginnings, anguish over old endings. Great new ideas to nurture, bad old ideas to quash. The new year’s plans, the old year’s mistakes. And, then of course, there are those pesky resolutions.
How about — as opposed to New Year’s resolutions — a little irresolution for 2016? The talented singer/songwriter Michelle Krell apparently turns to poetry from time to time. This rumination on life and time was enclosed with her holiday letter. It is presented below, with her permission, as a New Year’s gift to readers: the procrastinators, the disorganized, the well-intentioned, God bless us every one.
THE BACKLOG
Youth has no unfinished projects
No half-written melodies
No scribbled first lines of a musical comedy starring somebody famous
No first pencil sketch for a rolling 19th century landscape in oils
No first brushstrokes for a portrait, you know, a masterpiece like the Mona Lisa
No evenly-spaced staff lines mapped out with hundreds of tiny sixteenth-notes in pencil, some crossed out
No shoeboxes with unsorted glass beads on broken strings
No velvet bag of unrepaired, unmatched earrings, some plastic, from the 1970s
No shelves of unread books
No socks needing to be matched with mates missing for 9 years or more
No basket of mending from when your aunt was alive, you got it when you cleared out her house
No collection of spools of thread from the ‘30s from the same aunt, the thread permanently, hopelessly tangled
No boxes of unsorted photos from decades of family reunions
No garden that has had no improvements since you bought the house 20 years ago
No roses that are far past their lifetime and needed to be dug up long ago
No battered and faded curtains that would dissolve if washed; and why are they still up?
No seed of a book of poetry in which poems have been re-written until they stopped breathing
No undated lists of good intentions on wide-ruled binder paper
No itemized plans for rearranging small possessions that can now not be found
No single favorite patent leather shoe that knows the mystery of its lost mate, but will not tell
No collection of old toothbrushes that have a use which will reveal itself someday
No half-begun intricate stencil decoration across the upper wall of the baby’s room; he now has a family and lives in Toledo
No splintered and rusted garden shed that would look like Sunset Magazine, or could perhaps…
No pile of gravel overcome with weeds—the beginnings of an elaborate walkway through what are now rusted garden benches next to a ghost of a trellis for grapevines that never climbed anywhere
There are no grapes and no hint of a garden path
But—there could be…
I love this. Thank you for sharing it. I am not going to read Marie Kondo’s, Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, but it does have some mysterious pull on me. If I followed that path, then nothing would be left undone. No tangled threads, no rusty garden gates.
I am definitely in favor of leaving something undone, as that’s worked well for me for lo these 8 decades.
Ah, a note of wisdom from a woman in her 8th decade to a woman in her 5th. The drive to complete everything gets in the way of being present sometimes.
Sigh…That is so true it’s scary! And what about all the backlogged emails and blogs? Just now getting to this!
I am more heavily into forgiveness every day. Especially forgiving self for the backlog . . . etc. . .