Ah, January! After the flurry of Christmas – wrapping presents, baking cookies, hosting family – the bright skies and peaceful, quiet days of January always arrive as relief. I pack away the decorations with glee and crack open a fresh pocket calendar, ready to restart my life.
Many of us take the New Year as a time to bring ourselves back to center. This is the point of all those resolutions: join a gym, lose twenty pounds, read a classic every month. But this year, I recognized my list of resolutions as all-too-familiar companions. I’ve adopted the same must-do’s every year; yet each January, there they are, still in need of attention.
It reminds me of when my younger son was small and seemed deaf to my requests. No matter how many times I told him to stop running around and get in the car, he did so only when I threatened to quarantine his stuffed animals. A therapist finally pointed out that I yelled instructions to my son so often he had stopped listening; it was all just background noise. “Don’t speak to him until you are ready to make sure he hears you,” she suggested. What wisdom! It worked like a charm.
Which raises the question: am I ready to listen to myself? And how about listening to the “small quiet voice within,” as the Quakers say? Perhaps I’m embracing the wrong resolutions. After all, I’ll probably be fighting those same extra pounds the rest of my life. Maybe this year I could resolve to do something more radical, like adopting a resolution aimed outward, something to benefit the larger world instead of myself.
As I thumbed through my friends’ holiday cards, I was struck by how many contained messages pleading for peace. As terrorism and violence rock our world and the climate swings more precariously, many of us long for more safety and calm.
My resolution, then, will be to work for peace, wherever and however I can. I’ll start with those around me and work outward, following the guidance of the Quaker Peace Testimony: “The work of peace is the work of sustaining relationships of mutual human regard, of seeing and speaking to that of God in everyone, of seeking peace within ourselves, the family, the community and the world. The Kingdom of God is both present in each of us and a goal yet to be fulfilled. The task may never be done, but sustained by God’s love we are called to pursue it.”
Wendy Swallow, Clerk of Reno Friends Meeting
email: wswallow54 (at) gmail.com
The opinions expressed above are not necessarily those of Reno Friends Meeting.