The Middle Distance
It was early morning in deep winter at the end of the year when I walked to Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. I was alone and it was quiet enough to hear the bubbling of water under the geyser’s cone. That stone was created by thousands of years of minerals accumulating from cooling water; water which arose from the depths of the earth, heated by rock so hot it is molten.
The next day would be a new year and a new rotation around the sun. An arbitrary one, since “new” years are marked all the time with birthdays and anniversaries. But the move from December 31st to January 1st is, at least in most of North America, a shared turning of the page. A clearing of the throat.
“I was scared of January 1st because it was an easy date to say - after this, I won’t.”
All the social media posts and news articles would soon be about the bests of last year and what was to come for the new year. There would be goal-settings and calendar flippings. There would be reflections on achievements or lack thereof. Thoughts of change would be dust motes in the air.
I was scared of January 1st because it was an easy date to say that after it, I wouldn’t. What I wouldn’t do is a lengthy list, of course, but the top five “wouldn’t”s necessitate sitting with the discomfort of a massive craving for whatever it was going to be at 2:51 in the afternoon on a Thursday. And then again at 5:05 and the next day at 8:36, and so on.
“It’s a watch turning a second hand, moving incrementally towards the horizon like an infinity pool. ”
Because unfortunately, at least for me, change happens all the time and in microdoses; that is its secret. It’s a watch turning a second hand, moving incrementally towards an infinity pool horizon. It’s a lot like the molecules of minerals that stack onto each other each time the geyser erupts and voila, a few millennia later there’s a rock formation.
It turns out big is the sum of many littles which shouldn’t come as a surprise, but I have to re-learn it more often that I’d like to admit. Change happens when driving down the freeway and it happens in the shower and it happens when you put your phone facedown on the counter.
In the last year, I visited the highest mountains on Earth but the best parts came on the trail to get there. I watched water spurt from miles beneath the surface as one year turned to another. I did a lot of work in the middle distance too, both in terms of how and where I moved my body, and what I made while sitting in front of a computer screen. Some of it was lovely, some mediocre, some pretty terrible. All of it represented minor course corrections and I came out different in ways that I couldn’t always recognize.
A year’s work is a year’s change, no matter how small.
Inspired by events at Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming
on the land of 27 current tribes with historic connections to the lands and resources now found within Yellowstone National Park (source: NPS)