As I sit down to write this, I know what I want to say, but I have no idea how to express it in words that won’t seem trite. I’m trying hard to avoid the sickly, over-ripe scent of platitude.  

For me, 2014 has been a year of endings. In January I decided to call time on a 24-year career, and also on a 3-year sojourn in France. These had both been fabulous experiences and there is so much I’ve enjoyed about both my company and my adopted country. But in both cases it was time to move on; time to try something new. Then in June, my wife decided to call time on our 26-year marriage. And that didn’t feel the same to me at all. I wasn’t ready for that change; in fact I would never have been ready for it. I couldn’t see past it to any kind of new future. It felt like something much more terminal. An ending. And then a void.

But vacuums don’t easily exist in nature. We can create them artificially, but we can’t sustain a void without enormous effort. As much as I might have wanted to hide from the world, and as much as I didn’t want to look for new love, somehow love found me. And now for each of these endings I can see new beginnings. I find myself in December, living in yet another (old) new country, working on a new career path, and suddenly, unexpectedly, head over heels in love with someone new.

I could never respect the “Harriet Smith” character in Jane Austen’s “Emma”; her propensity to fall repeatedly in love always seemed way too accidental to me; too passive. Yet somehow I’m caught up in a whirlpool that’s simultaneously planned and deliberate, conscious and intelligent, visceral and instinctive, and utterly, utterly delicious. Because someone else has chosen to share that whirlpool with me. And this is just the beginning.  

What am I trying to say here? That I could see the potential life beyond the end-points that I chose myself (career and country), but I couldn’t do that when the end-point was not of my own making. But in every case, the world beyond that end-point was the same, whether or not the Ending was of my choosing. The range of opportunities in life is unlimited; what holds us back is our own visibility of those opportunities. Sometimes what appears to be utter darkness is just the result of us choosing to keep our eyes tightly closed. Or an apparent lack of choice is just our decision to focus on one specific option (which then isn’t an option at all; you need two options before you actually have any sense of self-determination). In animals, as in humans, our natural survival instincts cause us to narrow our focus when in fight-or-flight mode; but as we relax, our peripheral vision opens up again and the full range of possibilities and choices becomes visible once more. 

I believe we are defined by the choices we make. I choose to begin again.

Happy New Year.