And To Make An End...

...For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning...
T.S. Eliot

For those of us who tend to over-think almost everything, have an inbuilt obsession with attaining an unattainable perfection, and seem hell-bent on criticising every aspect of our tortured selves on a regular basis, the end of a year can feel like an impossibly difficult time. 

The expectation that everything will and should change for the better, is difficult to avoid. The predilection for ruminating on the past year's 'failures' and less than successful projects and relationships is rife and often overwhelming. As Charlotte Carpenter so succinctly puts it in her beautiful song Another Year - "...this trip around the sun, it ain't easy..."



I watch myself going through all these fears, disappointments and anxieties year after year and only seem to add to the chaotic mix of chemical imbalances by attempting to stop feeling the feelings that cause such pain but ultimately cannot be undone by undoing.

Having, by no small miracle, begun to put into practice the probably life-long lesson of allowing feelings - whether they feel helpful or less so - to flow through unhindered throughout this past year, I imagined that this year end would be less painful than the previous. Yet despite putting mental, emotional and situational safety barriers in place, I've found the crossover from 2019 to 2020 just as exhausting and full of disappointment with myself, one or two unfortunate others and with life itself.

Putting the past behind us as Eliot suggests in the wonderful quote above (and elsewhere in his Four Quartets piece), is no easy task and takes huge amounts of courage and trust in the eternal process of change. 

The idea of calling an end to one way of being and thereby allowing a new way to come forth, however, is very appealing and resonates loudly in my soul. Thus, I have allowed myself the miserable luxury of spending the day (and much of the previous night) immersed in all the sadness that came skulking out of the new year woodwork, ruminating over unhelpful thoughts and disappointments whilst simultaneously attempting to employ the art of observing feelings without too much judgement. 

It's been a long day but I feel ready to make an end and let the beginning roll in. I hope you do too.. x


P.S. The following extract from Burnt Norton, Part 1 of Eliot's Four Quartets (perhaps not intentionally) sums up the feelings of fear and anxiety that, perhaps necessarily, hang over this time of year poignantly. I also like how it (definitely unintentionally) evokes the Twittersphere quite beautifully.

...Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world...