No resolution. Just clues.

The first thing that happened on New Year’s Day was that an Eastern gray squirrel bounded up the front stoop, then sat on a cement planter outside the window by the door while I put my boots on. The squirrel looked at me, tilting its head first a bit to the right, then to the left. I looked back at her, or him. Was she hungry? Cold? Unlikely. The temperature was above freezing after a couple of days of ice and snow. She probably keeps warm just fine in the barn, especially now that we boarded the windows and bolted the doors for winter. There’s plenty to eat in the compost pile.

There’s some evidence for animal curiosity beyond it simply making sense on a survival level. This squirrel seemed ready to come inside, like she would have rung the doorbell if only she had been a little taller. We made eye contact, and then she didn’t run away until our dog came to the window five or six seconds later. In those seconds, I wonder, what did she see, looking at me? And if she really could see me, as I could see her, what was going on in her tiny brain?

Later, after breakfast, I chopped bacon and tossed it in a pot to start the Hoppin’ John, the dish I make on New Year’s Day, despite not growing up with it, nor being Southern. I thought about the small dinner party I attended the night before with seven people I love and admire, and how, after the stroke of midnight and accompanied by many glasses of champagne, we blurted out resolutions. There were good ones, funny ones, serious ones, predictable ones. Except, I had no resolutions. Couldn’t even make something up on the spot. Resisted making something up on the spot.

In the past few weeks as I’ve reflected on the year, the ten years, leading to this moment, and what I might choose to focus on going forward, I realized, I resolve every day. I resolve to improve, extend, challenge myself in some way: read more, drink less, listen better, stay in the present, attend the bees, run on a treadmill, clean out closets, listen to new music, eradicate weeds, volunteer. I write things down in my morning or evening journal. I think about those missives, I act on them. I rarely start a day without a “should” that I then zealously try to incorporate in a methodical way. I rarely end a day without some reflections on what went well, and what could have gone better. My life, whatever else it may be, is an ongoing exercise in self-improvement.

While I rinsed the black-eyed peas to add to the pot, words of advice I’d shared with my daughter throughout middle and high school sounded in my head: “We’re each in charge of our own story.” This came up in the times of “what if?” What if they don’t accept me? (friends, colleges, teachers, summer programs.) What if I change my mind? (about boys, professional intentions, plans for Saturday night.) Those were some of her recurrent themes. There were other bits of advice mixed in, but it often seemed right to say out loud: “you’re in charge of your own story.” Here I was saying it to myself on New Year’s Day.

I’m in charge of my own story. Well, okay. What of story? On a day when it seems imperative to set an intention, make declarations, tighten the very path we’re supposed to be on, all I cared to do was shrug. And notice the thing about the squirrel. If I look at the story that is my life, and I take to heart that I’m in charge of it, as I like to tell other people they are in charge of their own, then I’m going to claim the right to define what is meant by story.

I’ve been reading of late Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative. It’s a book about the craft of writing that examines patterns as story, beyond the conventional arc of narrative evolution, then resolution. And does so with expansive intent.

Maybe, like Alison, and the many writers she cites and work she describes, I’m losing interest in the “causal plot and persistent arc.” Maybe I want to study the designs of my life and relay those to myself and here to others in none of the usual ways. Maybe as Alison suggests the alternates may be, I want to track color across my life, or texture, or symmetries and repetitions.

I don’t have any New Year’s resolutions because, in part, I seek no new assignments from myself right now. I took great delight in a squirrel who came up to the front door as I was putting my boots on yesterday morning. We observed one another for nearly ten seconds through the window. I don’t know why she came to the door as if on cue. But it’s the beginning scrap of evidence for the year, or a scrap of evidence around which a story might be built. A story that I’m somewhere inside, swirling with, riding waves of, or meandering. It seems as good an entry point for a year as any.

Resolution

There’s the thing I shouldn’t do

and yet, and now I have

the rest of the day to

make up for, not

undo, that can’t be done

but next time

think more calmly

breathe, say here’s a new

morning, morning

morning

(though why would that

work, it isn’t even

hidden, hear it in there,

more, more

more)

—Lia Purpura