A New Year’s Wish

In that small space of time between one year passing and another beginning, it’s good to find a ledge of quiet. It’s good to sit on that quiet ledge and ask what our lives are longing for and to listen, really listen, to the response. It's good to acknowledge the things we're grateful for from the old year and what we're hopeful for in the new one, to recognize the things we've learned (or not learned) in the past twelve months and to wish ourselves and others another new beginning. From this listening, and these wishes, new traditions and lives can be born.

Every year on the morning of New Years Eve I buy a colorful bundle of biodegradable balloons, filled with helium and tied with long, bright ribbons. Each person who comes for New Year’s dinner is given at least one balloon. Depending on the kind of year they’ve had and how much they have to say about that, they could get three or four.

After the meal is finished, but before our attention is completely given over to dessert, we take out our marking pens. Using the balloon as our work surface, friends and family write down their dreams, prayers and wishes for the upcoming year.

Those who want to share what they’ve written can do that. There’s no superstition that verbalizing the dream will prevent it from coming true. Even so, most of us have at least one secret wish we keep just between ourselves and our balloon. Shortly before ringing in the New Year, we go outside and stand in a clearing. At the stroke of midnight we release the balloons into the sky.

There’s something both thrilling and instructive about watching the varying paths of those dream-bearing balloons. Some rise straight up, catch a strong current and soar. Others falter, change directions or get caught in cross currents before making their way up. A few get their ribbons snagged in trees and have to wait for a strong wind to lift them off. Some balloons burst before they even clear the tree line. Just like the dreams themselves.

One year my mother was stumped on what to write on her balloon. While the rest of us busily wrote out half a dozen or more things we hoped for, Mom couldn’t think of a single thing. Finally, she wrote something down. When I asked her what she had wished for she said,

“That I’ll be sitting right here next New Year’s Eve.”

I teased her for wishing for so little, especially since it was something she would so clearly receive anyway. I suggested she ask for something more.

“Ok, she laughed. “I’d really like to win the lottery and someday, though not too soon, I’d like to go to heaven.”

“Write it down, Mom,” I insisted. And she did.

Because the night was cold and her crane-like legs unsteady, I took my mother’s balloon out to the clearing for her that night and offered it to the sky. It flew straight up and headed north in the direction of Canada.

The following year, there was an empty chair at our New Year’s table. My mother was gone. Once, I didn’t understand that it’s not a small thing to simply wish to continue to live, to wish to sit at a table and enjoy food and conversation with loved ones. I understand that now. Such are the lessons to be learned in a single year.

And looking ahead to another year’s beginning, I wonder what it will bring. In some ways, history—individual and collective—will repeat itself. Fortunes, small or large, will be made and lost. Hopes will be happily realized or finally dashed. A war may end and another may begin. Things that occupied all of our attention this past year will be replaced, and sometimes even forgotten, by new stories, new leaders, new times.

And in nearly every family, someone will be born and someone will die. How then, will we best live the time between what was and what will be? How will we live the present?

Nuala O’Faolain, the Irish writer, has some good advice on that subject. In an interview with Ms. magazine, O’Faolain was asked about her approach to writing the memoir. Not so coincidentally, many of her tips for writing a fine memoir are good ones to follow in living a fine life. These tips include being alert to your chances, finding a genuine solitude within yourself and telling the truth.

But my favorite, and typical of O’Faolain’s wry directness, is this: be reckless. If this advice sounds a little too crazy-Irish, her explanation is really more about being brave than foolhardy.

“You’re going to be dead forever. This is the footprint you’ll have left on the earth. Open yourself up, put yourself out there, throw caution to the wind. Why put yourself through the tedious business of writing a whole book if you don’t take the opportunity to let your whole self flourish?”

And whether we know it or not, whether we ever put pen to paper or even to balloon, each of us is writing a book. It’s the story of our lives. Why put ourselves through the rigors of that story if we don’t tell it, and live it, with joy, honesty and courage? After all, the only certainty among all the phantasms of our fears is that someday we will die.

Why not make the living sweet? Why not, finally, this year?

-Kate Spencer is a Spokane-based writer and the editor of Imagine magazine.