Keep Going

It's not about beginning or starting again

I’ve been thinking to myself this is how I start again. This is about new beginnings, reinvention, a new life, a new me. Well it’s not. I’m still who I was two months ago, before the troubled times began. It’s actually disingenuous to say the troubled times began two months ago. The crisis began two months ago, but must have been brewing under my ever not watchful eye for a long time. But then it was full blown crisis and then it was fight and flight and freeze all at once. And now there is a certain kind of calm, a very focused, directed stress toward the solo management of my businesses, and my house and my animals, and my relationships. I’m not beginning again. I’m continuing what I have, I keep going.

All the aspects of myself I am sure of are still here. I am strong and resilient, tender and resourceful. I know how to get stuff done. I’m on time and efficient. I’m deeply worried about finances but also know it doesn’t need to be solved today. I can and will problem solve myself out of this, once I get a sense of what it actually is. Keep going.

But the grief is real and once every couple of days I’m immobilized by it, as if I’m walking through a fog and all I want to do is lie down and sleep forever. There is the outer get shit done, survive, figure out life aspect. And there is the deep sadness of loss which resides concurrently in my heart. Keep going.

Change is a funny thing, especially this time of year. People are resolving and beginning again and making better choices, and maybe slipping up on those choices. Back to the gym, eat more vegetables, hit that protein goal, read fifty books, less screen time, write that novel, look for a new job, learn a new language, go to Egypt, declutter. Most of these goals are external, or they are external activities which are meant to change our insides as well, to make us feel better, more alive, more connected. It would be funny to have a resolution which read “keep going.”

But change happens when we least expect it and it isn’t scheduled and put in a planner. The deepest changes which have happened in my life were shocks and surprises, were adjustments I didn’t plan or ask for. Life happened and I kept going. I know what the alternative is. And in the keeping going is the change. 2024 was bookended by tragedy: the loss of my sister and the loss of my life partner. The middle had some good stuff, but grief was there throughout. Grief will persist. To deny it is to not honor it. Keep going.

The Wheel of Fortune is my tarot card for 2025. My word for 2025 is change. Not insofar as I need a change, or I need to change. But that the inevitability of change I don’t control or can’t quite understand is going to happen whether I stick my thumb down hard on it, trying to prevent its movement or not. There are processes in the works which are not mine to dictate. There are moons (the current wolf moon in Cancer if that’s your jam), our inability to control others as much as we’d like to, the synchronicities which delight and amaze, the what ifs, the idea that there really is something else, something other, which can hurtle us forward into the unknown. That unknown liminal place, this is the place of change. Maybe another word for change in this context is allow. I’ll allow this wheel of fortune to spin and I will allow its gifts to unfold, even if they sometimes, often times these days, feel tragic.

Change is in the air. And I appreciate my connection to you all so much.

I’d love to know your tarot card and/or word of the year. If you need help picking one let me know. It will bolster me through this.

xoHanna