2025: Resolved
"Happy New Year, all ye merry chumps!"
My journalist friend was making coffee in the little kitchen at O-dark:30 yesterday morning. I had no idea she was planning to visit. I’m also not entirely sure if she’s real.
She pops in from time to time, passing from here to there. We get a lot of visitors like that—they’re all coming and going, bringing stories of their travels. The monastery is a bit like a frontier outpost in the middle of nowhere, but instead of trading in textiles and hardtack, we have Mysteries and reading lists.
She was there doing something with a French press coffee maker that we evidently had stowed away in a cabinet. I had no idea. I’m delighted. I became a French press guy earlier this year.
My friend and I have nothing in common but perhaps the most important things: we seek and we roam and God-willing, we tell stories. She is on the other side of all the fences from me: politics, religion, but evidently not coffee. The publications we’ve both written for are as binary opposite as can be imagined. But ever since she first arrived, our conversations have been fast and interesting, topics spilling over topics, each of us, I suppose, with a touch of creative ADD.
I say that I don’t know if she really exists because, curiously, no one else is around when she is. Perhaps it’s because she’s an early riser and early depart-er, too. She appears out of the dark and departs with the sunrise. She leaves when all the monks and visitors are in Matins or Divine Liturgy. (Yes, where I should be). We’ll say goodbye, and she’ll roll her suitcase down the hall and head to whichever side of the country has a story to tell. The door through which she departs, which is big and heavy and impossible to close quietly, will send an echo down the long hallways.
A monk will appear from around the corner. “Who were you talking to?”
“That writer woman. You know—Whatshername.” And I’ll struggle to remember her name because I’m terrible at that. (I once forgot the groom’s name during the toast. I was his best man.)
“Who?”
“You know—she writes for the Times or the New Yorker or something.”
The monk will shrug and go about his duties.
I swear she’s real. I’ll ask around to see if anyone saw us on a prayer walk around the lake this morning.
This is my monastic experience. People come and go. They pass us here in the middle, apparently unaware that this is Paradise.
Your idea of Paradise might include palm trees, white sand, and a painfully blue-clear sea. Honestly, given the opportunity to go to such a place right now, I wouldn’t hesitate. This thing I call “Paradise” features a vast, brown lawn and trillions of leaves I’m doomed to fail to 100 percent clean up yet again. Battling weeds is a four-season job.
Nonetheless, this place-between-the-worlds is a satellite nation of Heaven. I struggle to explain it, to show rather than tell, but I know I’ll be about as successful at that as I will will be with the leaves. A thousand sentiments do not add up to one solid proof. Even me, with my doubts and rebellion and anger and all the rest of it, senses that this place is consecrated. The travelers sense it, too. The word is out. People come from around the nation and around the world to check it out.
Some people coming through might think of it as a quaint hostel or extremely reasonably priced AirBnB—a place to crash in the midst of their travels. Joke’s on them—they’ll definitely be taking something with them when they go whether they like it or not.
Acting as host to the travelers has, at times, been a bit of a challenge. Not because I don’t enjoy serving them—I certainly do. I always thought that service-as-a-vocation in Downton Abby made a lot of sense. Hospitality is a foundational principle of eastern Christianity, at least as I’ve experienced it in Melkite Greek-Catholicism and Georgian Orthodoxy.
The challenge, however, has been serving those who haven’t fallen out of the world. They are able to do things and go places, and while their lives aren’t without challenges, they have relationships and love and, well, choices.
We had a visitor here who came to be near his son and his family, who were also long-term visitors. He ended up converting to Orthodoxy and staying for awhile, too. He and I still had a lot of our worldly sense of humor when we got here, which, as it happens, doesn’t mesh so well with the consecrated atmosphere of the monastery. As we became more “acclimated” to monastic life, we had a rough patch in our friendship, but it’s impossible to read these readings or go to liturgy together and maintain a grudge. We reconciled after a bit.
Then, one day, he was gone. I had no reason to expect he would stay here forever—he was insanely talented, spoke several languages, and was born for leadership.
I shot him a note after I’d heard he’d gone. He said he took a position in management with some company. I proposed that we should hang out sometime, but he demurred. I haven’t heard from him since.
That was a hard one, although I wouldn’t have admitted it at the time. He had left during a lull in visitations. All the rooms in the long residential wing were empty. There were no distant echoes of doors being accidentally slammed. And when I turned in for the night, his door—the one right across the hall from mine—was cracked open just enough to show nothing but darkness inside. I had gotten used to seeing his tall stack of books and chess board, ready for any challengers.
What was I still doing here? Why is this taking so long?
That was a perilous thought. Honestly, it slayed me a few times, especially after those holiday/birthday FaceTime calls with the kids when, through a tiny, glowing portal I could see the parallel universe in which they live—the one with a beautiful home, lots of their stuff all around, my dog, and, usually out of frame, but a presence I could still sense: my wife. The only thing missing in that little portal-world was the husband. The father. Me.
Why was this taking so long?
I have an answer now. I’ll tell you all about it in 2025 and beyond. If, that is, the Jersey drones, toxic fog, or China doesn’t get us. (Seriously—2025 is already blowing up people’s Bingo cards). I’m still figuring it out, but the answer is resolving like a figure coming toward you out of the sunrise.
Too much? How about this:
We’re always right where we need to be. That locale may challenge our expectations or demands, so just trust me on this for now: the more you resist a challenge, the longer it’s going to challenge you. I have never known this to be untrue. Ryan Holiday knocked it out of the park with, “The Obstacle is the Way.” Whatever is in your way will contain within itself the solution, or rather, the resolution, to itself.
That’s what I’m thinking about going into 2025. Last night a bartender asked me what my 2025 resolutions were. The place was empty, which, in the last hours of the most intense year of my life, was most welcome.
I honestly told him that I had nothing extra to add to the Plan. I’ve known my purpose for 35 years and I’m just going to double, triple, or quadruple down on the tasks that get me there. I need to use the little slices of time available to me a lot better, but other than that, I’m going to launch most of my attempts at project management into the sun.
He nodded and offered a fist-bump, which I obliged. “Same,” he said. I could tell he was no stranger at the gym. He was obviously very familiar with goals and discipline.
I paid the tab, from which he’d omitted that last gin & tonic (I highly recommend Aviation gin, by the way), and headed home. I thought the kids might call at midnight, but they didn’t. I could see from their kid-friendly social media platform that they were ringing in the new year with joy and friendship. They did send some messages, though. My girl CC said, “Daddy! I just said the best sentence of my life!”
Oh?
“I went outside and yelled ‘HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL YE MERRY CHUMPS!”
I gave her an ‘lol.’
“It’s going to be a good year,” she said. “I love you so much.”
Great stuff!
This hit all the right notes, stuff I’ve experienced and been chewing on the past several years. Thank you 🙏🏼