2020. A year for 20-20 insights into yourself and the world you’ve built around you. As I always do, I made it a point to celebrate the new year in the woods before 24 hours had passed. Nature makes it so easy to see what’s genuine inside and outside yourself – on the outside, clear air, white light, nothing synthetic, true horizons, everything organic; on the inside, neurons firing, full senses deployed, analysis balanced and hyper-tuned.

So, while many of my friends were sleeping off a hangover, I was getting drunk on motion by skiing my toukas off. Funny how cold can start a fire inside me if I rush into it. Some sharks have to keep moving in order to breathe, and that’s how I feel – as if I’m driving oxygen into my lungs until I’m supersaturated and glowing like a comet. Feels like I’m the most alive entity in the forest! And, since January in the northern climes is all about gestation and digestion, I probably am.

Plenty of dormancy insulated in Mom Nature’s womb, though. You can sense the stirring as palpable as a pregnancy within the earth. Into that incubating realm this mortal slips on slickened skinny skis, a zany human arrow zigzagging along crooked paths. Chutes and flumes challenge me to hang on, but there are moments when gravity relents and I am airborne. If I brake sharply, a whole enchantment stops with me, freezing as if we are in a game of hide and seek. The sudden silence is profound. My eyes search out secret bowers while my ears strain for the snap of a twig and the gleeful cry of “Ally Ally in Free!” But the stillness of Cathedral moments remains breathlessly pure.  

It is January in Minnesota in the year 2020 A.D.

So how goes your first month? Have you recovered from the holidays? Are your ducks in a row? Did you make a New Year’s resolution? Or did you sit out the holidays, dine on the ducks, and toss the New Year’s vow out the window in the first week? Gonna share mine with you:

RESOLVED: I, Snowstorm Sully, resolve to live à la carte.

Yup. Swore it on a ski trail one magic night and had it notarized by Bambi. Haven’t quite figured out what it means yet, but that will come to me. I recall I was thinking about unfulfilled people of my acquaintance when the epiphany hit (always trust epiphanies in the middle of the woods in the middle of the freaking night). Good people have unfulfillments, in fact maybe all of us, if we’re going to be honest. Sometimes the frustrations are minor. You feel like a PhD sitting in preschool blowing spit bubbles, or maybe you’re just starting to empathize a wee bit with rust, mold and petrifying wood. Then again, there are those whose dreams are more shredded than a kite in a tornado. It happens as insidiously as boredom. You give your all, but mundane routines siphon off your energy and wither the stem cells of a latent you. And that’s the problem, as it took me decades to learn (and continue to learn). If you keep presenting yourself like a full-course banquet to whatever the endeavor – a career, a relationship, your family – the objects of those efforts will, naturally, treat you like a buffet, picking and choosing only those aspects of you that suit their needs or appetites. A feast is not a snack, and over time, parts of you become a serious case of leftovers.

So that’s when the epiphany hit me, the metaphor: à la carte! You really can’t blame the appetites that don’t want or need your entire banquet. They’re just being honest. And, importantly, you can continue to give everything that’s needed to that career, relationship or social expectations. But if you want to actualize the sum total of who you are, you have to stop shrink-wrapping yourself in a world that's going to get what it wants where it wants from who it wants. You have a heart, a mind, a body. Serve them up à la carte where there’s a need or an appetite for what you’ve neglected in yourself. Full menu for one venue – out. Feed the need – in.

Can’t say my life is ever boring, and I’m astonished at how little changes in the way of choices, but I’ve always been slow to recognize the freedom to diversify myself, even when parts of me gather rust and dust. No one finds all of themselves in one place anymore. Got to differentiate who I am, compartmentalize heart, mind and body the same way the world does its loyalties, calculations and desires. It’s really just an extension of how I’ve partitioned my life to get along in society while pursuing my romantic idealism in private (something I’ve been escalating for years). No leftovers. À la carte in 2020. Bon appetit!

And, below, please find a dozen à la carte photos to start off the new year as follows: #1 just beyond those trees beckons one of my most memorable sites that I never ski past without reciting a poem to my inamorata; #2 love it when the trees wear snow bling; #3 this is how you meet interesting people, like Caroline, an environmentalist at a camp in northern Mini-snowda who saw me taking pix and offered to take one of me; #4-7 cherished vistas all (the one with the bench is just a snowball’s throw from #1); #8 selfie at night – the more shadows, the better I look; #9 first there was Grandma Moses, but who can touch Mom Nature for fine etchings; #10 this is Kari who challenged me to remember her after 12 years, and miraculously I did, since she looks the same as she did in high school (hey, Emily, did you do a double-take?); #11-12 friends of my lad, Shane the boy child, who cares for his animal residents like they are family in his capacity as General Manager of SeaQuest in Roseville – what a perfect job for Dr. Dolittle Jr. who grew up wanting to be a veterinarian!

Along with new beginnings, the end of the year brings up scroll after scroll of obits from the 12 months just past. You see them with a twinge of nostalgia and a chill, not just for their own sake, but because something has been taken away from you. Your world is diminishing, being replaced. You pre-date every newness that comes along. Unmistakably, you are receding into the past even as you grow within your own relevancy. Like everyone else, I want to live forever. I rather think I will…in some form. Even if I had no convictions about existence, reality, creation, the universe(s), purpose and meaning, I’ve experienced emotional echoes from somewhere, from people who are supposed to be gone. I’m more concerned with those connections – with whose consciousness do I want to adventure through eternity?

However old you are, someday soon – compared to the endlessness of forever – the play will end for you. It will end for all of us. We’ll peel off a little makeup, loosen the collars of our costumes, and step forward to take a bow in the spotlight, then step back with the rest of the cast. I like to think there will be applause, a lot of smiles and hugs, and maybe even a cast party. Our roles will be done, and we’ll look about at others who played a role in our lives and see them out of character for the first time, relaxed, unstressed. We’ll remember some laughs, some drama, and the whole thing may seem a little silly. Just an incredibly short play after all, a blip in eternity. And it must be okay – this ending of the play – because it’s normal. It happens to every living thing. Then it’s on to the next run! We are, after all, indestructible matter and energy. But leave the traditional ghost light burning on the stage of the empty theater, and take a few memories with you…

 

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan