I meant to post this weekend, but I got a little distracted putting together furniture. Since Ouiser is coming to stay with me soon, I am finally making some incremental progress on switching out the guest room and my office. My old office is still full of random piles of stuff, but I’ve mostly cleared out the guest room. To help motivate me I bought a new book case and desk for the new office space. They arrived remarkably fast this week, so I took it as a sign to get moving on this transformation.

As I worked to assemble these pieces into a book case. I realized how much I enjoy putting together furniture. Sounds crazy, I know, but hear me out. It’s a bit meditative for me. My part of my brain is occupied with following the instructions and assembling the pieces, but there is a portion of it that can also wander. It’s a little like when I listen to books as I do jigsaw puzzles. Only at the end of it, I have a piece of furniture I can point to and say, “Look what I did all by myself!”

Any one who has been around these pages any length of time, knows I have a complicated relationship with my independence and sense of accomplishment. I relish my independence, and can be pretty stubborn about doing things on my own. Because my experiences often reinforced the lesson that I needed to rely on myself. Yes, it can be an invaluable strength to have this kind of stubborn independence. It can also be a real challenge. Learning to ask for help is the lesson the universe keeps putting in front of me.

I could have asked for help with these pieces of furniture. Any number of friends would have come over and helped me moved the boxes up to the third floor of my townhouse. Instead, I unboxed them on the first floor and made multiple trips up and down the stairs before assembling them here in my new office. It all worked out in the end. Neither of these pieces required two people for assembly, and I get to feel a great sense of accomplishment in my office space! It may still be a bit of a struggle to get myself to sit down and write, but maybe that sense of accomplishment will transfer and push me to do a bit more writing.

Also, I’ve already asked for help when I eventually move that large dresser into the new guest bedroom. It is not, and never will be, a one person job. Even I know that.

My work anniversary, January 6th, didn’t disappoint this year. It brought a weather related base closure and more snow than I have seen in a long time. The year was kind to me, however, and this time I did not lose power, though I am pretty sure we got more snow this year. Between the base closure for Monday and Tuesday, delayed opening on Wednesday, and the national day of mourning for President Carter on Thursday, it was a very odd week. I still worked every day, except Thursday, but I never really felt like I had a good handle on the day or time. One of the women I work with summed it up nicely by calling January a month of Mondays. I am not sure how the whole month will go, but that was a very great description of this week. There just wasn’t much continuity built into it.

Continuity or not, I did survive the week. I enjoyed teaching. Although much of the content is the same, I have such a different group of students this year. It’s really nice. It helps that I have less going on personally this year, so I am able to bring more of myself fully to class. My morning routine isn’t completely locked in, but I have been able to read & write a bit nearly each day. Early morning coffee in bed by the light of my Kindle remains a magic time for me.

Around my birthday last year, I found this book: Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom. It’s set up like a devotional with a collection of quotations and short ideas for each day. Some are from Tolstoy, but most are passages he collected from other sources. Reading my daily passages and reflecting on them helped me to get back into my morning routine, and I am looking forward to spending this year with this collection of ideas. A couple of recurring themes so far are about kindness and connection. For example, our kindness towards one another unifies the world. Of course, given my theoretical foundation, the idea resonates with me.

While it is always a present concern in my life, I think connection is going to be an important theme for me this year. Creating, cultivating, and curating the connections in my life feels significant now. It’s already when chatting with a friend last week, I said, “There is so little connection right now that every one feels precious.” And, the truth of the statement rang in my ears. As usual with all my words, intentions, and conditions for the year, I don’t know what it will mean in practice; I just know that connections will be important this year, and I don’t think it will just be for me. I think the truth of my statement is not necessarily in my personal life, it is in our cultural moment. As if it confirm my intuition, this month’s issue of The Atlantic contains a great article called “The Anti-social Century.” If you don’t have a subscription, it is worth looking up in your local library.

With this focus on connection in mind I signed up for the text-only version of Tara Brach’s, “A Year of Courageous Loving.” It gets started on Monday. My curiosity about this year is pretty high. Connection is just one theme that seems to be running through my ether, so it will be interesting to see where we end up next year at this time. No big resolutions or promises from me about how many posts or what their format or content will be, but I think it might be a little more active, and hopefully interesting, around here this year.