TABULA RASA AND THE LONGEST NIGHT

As the year draws to a close, I find myself looking both backward and ahead. Late December carries the promise of a clean slate, a tabula rasa, as we close out the old year and move toward a new one. And yet, if you’ve lived long enough, you know there is no such thing as blank. Every breath carries memory. Every moment is shaped by what came before. We cannot help but arrive here marked.

This threshold coincides with the Winter Solstice, what Margaret Atwood calls “a place of caught breath.” The longest night. A pause in the dark before the light begins its quiet return. The world recalibrates, and for a moment, so do we.

There is an air of magic in all of it.

For most of us, I imagine December holds layers of meaning. Stories of birth and light, of stars marking thresholds, of hope arriving in unlikely places. Across cultures and belief systems, there is a shared impulse here: to look for meaning in the dark, to trust that light is not lost, only waiting.

On the night of December 24th, I rarely sleep.

As a child, I was too alive with anticipation. So excited about what might be waiting beneath the tree that I kept the whole house awake. That part of me never quite grew up. I still wrestle with sleep, though the reason for the anticipation has changed. What waits beneath the tree is no longer a mystery to me; much of it was placed there by my own hand.

What I lie awake with now is something quieter, and deeper: how those I love will react. Whether the choices I made for them will land as hope, as joy, as confirmation that they are seen.

Perhaps that’s why the turn of the year stirs such anticipation. We hope—sometimes desperately—for something kinder. Lighter. More humane.

So, I choose to step into the coming year with curiosity. Not because life hasn’t bruised me—it has—but because curiosity is a decision. A refusal to harden. A way of staying awake to possibility.

I don’t know what will be written on the year ahead. That, too, is part of the wonder. Part of the magic.

May you meet it with openness.

And may the light return, steadily, for us all.

Light over Ethiopia. Photo credit: Nicole Hunter Campbell