between the years

There's surely, deep inside the pile of verbosity that is this blog, already a post with this name. As I'm sitting in my mom's living room, cut off from the data of the world, I have no way of checking. But I know it's a fitting title. Between the years is frequently used in German to denote the time between Christmas and New Year's Day, when it feels like the old year has ended but the new one hasn't started yet. For a few precious days, time seems to stand still. Work has ended for the year, obligations have been met, errands run. All Christmas gifts have been handed over and received. Shops need not be visited in a while. Families, united for those few days after a year apart, spread big dinners over many hours, play board games like in the olden days, go on trips into the countryside, or soak up culture. Time is spent most leisurely and in utter peace. This time, between the years, is also commonly a time for contemplation and reflection, and contemplation and reflection were what drove me to write the lines that follow, to elucidate inchoate thoughts.

It started with a feeling I can't explain in words, a feeling of dramatic change that is nagging me. In the rational blurriness of my mind's eye, many things about me look different – in mysterious, transcendental, inexplicable ways. It's as if there were striking differences about me and deep inside that I'm just not able to pick up. If I learned more about myself, if I paid more attention, maybe I could put my finger to it. As it is, I have only a hunch that in the new year my life will not have much to do with my life so far. There's a smell in the air that tells me this, a smell that no one else notices.

Compared to twelve months ago, things look much the same on the outside (with the exception of the apartment that I changed only a week ago). My job hasn't changed at all. My interests are still the same. I hang out with the same people and enjoy doing the same things. London is as attractive to me as it has been from day one. I have a blast exploring the city, I take pictures, I go to concerts. I travel. I read and I write. I dream of writing more and better.

Looking back over this past year, I'm filled with gratefulness. I have done most of the things I had set out to do and some I hadn't. Of last year's New Year's resolutions, most (Again, not having the archive open in front of me, I'm guessing.) were filed in the Done box and those that haven't are of the kind that is likely to remain perpetually unaccomplished. The next year and the years to come, I could go on as I have been going, and it wouldn't hurt.

However, I've been feeling changes, the changes that I've mentioned earlier, over the last two months. A new kind of seriousness is trying to take hold of my mind. Up to now, I've always followed my fancy and always done what I felt like, at the spur of a moment. I have studied languages not because knowing them would be beneficial to me but because I liked the idea. I started teaching myself the recorder because my sister pressed the instrument in my hand, with the vague words, “You need a new challenge.” I've read two dozen books this year and written nearly 120 blog posts, all without following a grand plan. At work, I've been doing research, carving projects and changing directions according to what seemed right at the moment.

Lately, I've been thinking that this can't be the right approach anymore. My sister picked up my late grandfather's violin, abandoned when had died almost three decades ago, and had it fixed and refurbished and got a bow and took lessons. She wants to play a piece by Bruch that she likes a lot. It's a concrete challenge that got her started and will keep driving her. I play the recorder just for the hell of it. I don't get much pleasure out of it at the moment and I have no illusions of being good one day. Music is opening windows into an unknown world, and I'm learning mountains as I practice, but there's no goal to keep me focused. Now I'm wondering whether I should stop.

I also wonder why I keep attending Arabic classes. I will never speak the language and never be good enough for a decent conversation with even the most generous native. It's just too fiendishly difficult. I feel the urge to give it up – not because of the difficulty but because it's a dead-end road. The same goes for photography. I will always take picture on trips, to have something visual to go with dimming memories. I take good pictures, but I can't make the claim of being a great photographer. I don't have the creativity or the artistic eye to produce something outstanding. Should I chuck my camera?

Concerning the delicate topic of writing, the arguments can be laid out similarly. The abundance of nearly 120 posts this year translates into a good two-hundred hours at the keys of a computer, more than eight full days racking my brain for creative ways of putting words together, for smoothly flowing logic and convincing arguments, to put sense into thoughts that seemed lucid and bright only until they left the coziness of the unspoken. More than 70,000 words that scream, with voices that I can hear increasingly clearly and loudly, for a better treatment, for a higher destination than the scrap heap of written loquaciousness, the blogosphere. Must I stop?

As I do the things that I do for my enjoyment, I'd have to find something equally enjoyable to replace them with, but as I'm perpetually short of time, I would have to find replacements for only a fraction of the things I abandon. Like a closet before a move, I could clean out and simplify my leisure, and then maximize my pleasures by giving each one meaning.

Writing is the most meaningful occupation to which I devote my time outside work, and while I devote a courageous amount of time, I don't devote myself. I'm not serious about it (and wasn't honest enough to admit this before now), and I don't work on it. I write when inspiration strikes me, in little cowardly bursts of a thousand words or so, unrelated from one day to the next, floating in a vacuum of insolently disturbed silence. It's writing of the cheapest kind, cheaper than chips, of the kind that's discarded all over the internet. How can I be satisfied?

A new seriousness would define a different approach. It would force me to work hard and focus sharply, overcoming the tiredness of advanced nights, night after night, to craft something bigger than what you're reading, something good, something that can't be put together in an hour on an armchair. The ideas have long been there, born of years of unsteady life. I have been talking about Syria and I had promised myself to have a travelogue published by now, but nothing has come of it, absolutely nothing. I have the outlines of several fictional stories in my head, but can't find the strength to take them and mold them gently or pound them into shape. Blogging is much too easy and the poorest excuse for not writing: “But I AM writing – I'm blogging.”

So for the new year, I'll try to have the changes that have been welling up inside me shift my equilibrium of seriousness and fun towards the former. I've always been doing things spontaneously and without too much drama. I will continue to refuse agonizing about the consequences of future possibilities. When things happen, I'll see how they are and I'll deal with them. But I've also come to understand, at a deep, almost physical level, that some sort of strategy or game plan is important, that without a goal, a lot of pursuits are vain and wasteful, no matter how much pleasure they offer.

In words that are deliberately obfuscated, this means that I will write less to write more, that I'll do less to do more, that I might give up certain privileges I treasure to win infinitely amplified happiness, and that I'll consider arriving where before traveling seemed the only option. Without the immobility of the past few days and the undisturbed hours of contemplation, I would have no idea how eagerly I'm looking forward to the new year.