I am not a positive person.

At least I don’t think of myself that way. I’m more pragmatic. Things happen. We respond. And always looking on the bright side when you are seeing people in hard times can be really annoying.

So having to spend a week being positive, more accurately, testing positive, feels counter character.

Spending the week at home, sick but not devastated, mental fog slowly lifting, energy but not lots of margin, caring for each other, capable of writing but not of sustained thinking, a couple of limited field trips fully masked.

Often, after this kind of a season, we write lists of ten lessons we learned. We are suddenly experts on what it must be like to experience chronic illness, to have enduring constraints on mobility. We are profoundly grateful for all kinds of things.

I won’t presume to have acquired such expertise in such a short time.

On the other hand, I am acutely aware of accumulated fatigue from the last few months and am grateful for a mandated slower pace.

In our cultural conversations, January reflects a fresh start, a new opportunity for resolve, for recommitment, for new goals and/or renewed systems. And mid-January resonates with confessions of failing on those new commitments. But the changing of the calendar doesn’t remove the experiences and fatigues of the previous months and years.

Perhaps the reason that we start each year with ideas, and then run afoul of illness or distraction or overload most years in January or February is that we haven’t actually recovered from the years past. Perhaps the illness in our bodies is for the good of lives.

For my friends who are well into a delightful year, congratulations. For the rest of us, who needed the rest, perhaps the new year starts in February.

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Last Thursday, the first episode of Finding Words in Hard Times – the podcast came out on Apple and on YouTube. You can play it directly from the website, too.

Finding Words in Hard Times – the podcast on Youtube

Finding Words in Hard Times – the podcast on Apple

Finding Words in Hard Times – the podcast website home

It started because on December 7, after a run, I asked this question on Instagram and Facebook:

What if I took some of the statements from “this is hard”, my collection of things I say to people when their loved ones have died, and I did about a six-episode, podcast, expanding on those statements and chapters. There would be a little more explanation, there would be a little bit of example, and each one would be probably between 12 and 15 minutes long. Would you be interested in listening?

Some people, some of you, said that you’d be interested.

Thank you.