So, what did you do with the extra hour? Granted, it was right before the election, and most people just wanted 2020 to end, and if you have kids, they were probably in a candy craze because it was Halloween, but time did a funny thing back on October 31^st. It slipped a gear. The people who mind the clock for almost all of the United States and Canada cooked the books and gave us back the hour they stole in cahoots with Daylight Savings Time. And it was a special hour because there was a rare event in the firmament that night. So, what did you do with that extra hour under a moon that was both full and blue?

My wish is that the pure silver rays from that celestial orb healed some of the damage that 2020 has done to relationships. Have you ever seen so much alienation, or perhaps experienced it yourself? Severed friendships, strained acquaintances, the toll between people, especially between men and women, has been profound. I count four breakups between couples I know and I see stress fractures in too many others.

If that describes you, and you see years of bonding going down the drain, consider what drew you together in the first place and how that deepened. There must have been a time when you first saw a face you thought you could look at every night for the rest of your life. Something clicked. Just their name made your heart surge with profound warm beats. In person, bright eyes captured you like twin daggers and you blushed and got all thumb-tongued. Your brain buzzed like a beehive, hot needles melted your core with sweet stings and time expanded to record a million nuances per second. You were twitterpated. Gobsocked. That was the bedrock that rocked the bed. From that attraction everything else grew day by day into a shared life. So, what happened? Time happened. So again I’m asking, did you zonk out early when Daylight Savings Time kicked back? Tsk-tsk. But there’s that gifted hour, still waiting to get you off the roller coaster that derailed you in 2020 and back on track in 2021.

Is it worth an hour of your time – that extra hour from 2020 – to save a strained relationship or a lifetime investment? What do you have to lose? Take that hour and fit it to the best memory you have – say, the hour you knew this was your soulmate. Maybe it was something simple like a walk, a conversation, a phone call, or something silly like watching your love trying to learn to ice skate and falling down. Or maybe it was something intensely romantic. I remember the precise hour that sealed it for me…

By imposed circumstance, passion and purest romance became separate rooms in my life. I never expected to find, or be found by, a soulmate, and I remember the exact moment I knew that it was possible, that I had captured and been captured by an indelible magic that answers all questions, all doubts about loving and being loved. You might think the moment was complex with thoughts and emotions, but no, it was a physical moment, like punctuation on the end of a chapter of discovery. We were lying in each other’s arms in utter darkness, as close to being one entity as you can get, and the high note of her purr on each exhalation was like the cloying note of a violin resonating behind my ear. Despite the blackness, I remember opening my eyes the barest inch away from her face and being able to discern that with her eyes closed she was actually grinning with joy. Vulnerability, innocence, surrender, trust and that incredible joy – all there in the epiphany of that moment, and it’s what made me certain that she was the one.

If you’ve had such a moment, mundane or euphoric, you save it as a perennial bookmark that tells you everything you need to know. The gods of irony may cast your fate like dice, or render your raptures finite, but the confirmation of a moment can allow you to live your life as if true love is banked in a 401(k) under your name. To bring this full circle to that gifted hour with which I started this ramble, maybe that wounded love is just lying there like kindling in the dark waiting for your spark. Do not let something as transitional as 2020 smother the flames…

Minus romantic passion, the same healing applies to all our relationships. Whether you understand other people or not, why let 20-20 blindness shrink your world? Some of us prioritize emotion, others prioritize reason. When balanced, they work wonderfully. But when unbalanced, emotion makes us gullible and reason makes us cold. Whichever way you tend, accept that you will encounter opposing imbalances in life’s venues and events, and that they will dumbfound or even repulse you. The truth may be that you are looking in a mirror that has simply reversed your own disparities.

The divide is hard to cross, because our natures look for affirmations of ourselves in that mirror and tend to interpret differences as rejection. Only by growing in insight and wisdom can you reap the benefits of both sides of the divide. The pitfalls are tragically easy to fall into: narrow-mindedness, a lack of courage, intransigence, intolerance, hypocrisy and double standards. Allowed to run riot as they have in 2020, those precursors produce hate (which is really fear) and every form of irrationality and manipulation. We may never find our way clear of that dark forest, but we can move toward the light of reason.

A dozen photos below: #1 is of Lillehammer, Norway (thank you, Jan Lockert – a Norwegian editor who flew me to Oslo to speak at the House of Literature and has since become a friend); the last two (#11-12) are of my friend Lexy on a favorite lake of mine in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota; and the rest of the photos are of moi and frequent Nordic ski haunts at Elm Creek or the lake behind my house.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan