Before Taking the First Step

There is something evocative -- almost magical -- about looking out over a broad field blanketed by new fallen snow, unbroken by footprint, hoof, or paw. Standing at the edge of its crystalline virginity all I can think to do is stare, enchanted, frozen along with it, hesitant to trample in and scramble its perfection.

All of a sudden there are plenty of those snow covered fields around, draped by the inches that have fallen since Christmas week and hardened by the sub-zero temperatures that have simultaneously hardened the rest of us. Very few have wanted to travel very far, and certainly not out into the calf-deep snow well above the protective warmth of boots.

But just as suddenly there is a different sort of virginal field stretching out around and in front in the face of which I feel similarly reticent. Here it is, the Monday of the first full week of the New Year. Fifty-two weeks of 2010 stretching out unbroken, untrampled, unsullied; only 354 shopping days until Christmas. Resolutions are the customary way to get ones hands around and fingers into the prospects, but I am more prone to pre-conceiving -- to sitting quietly here beside the fire and the lighted Christmas tree on its final day, thinking about the works already in process, the plans already on the calendar, the relationships already forming or fraying, the hopes and dreams and apprehensions carried with me into this new beginning, and wondering how they will all unfold and who I will be in the midst of them. Some of this, I recognize, is tantamount to crossing bridges before I get to them -- wringing my hands over milk that isn't yet spilled, and if 2009 taught me anything it was how suddenly the road can turn. And, to be sure, there is room in all this pre-conceiving for imagining what all could transpire that I never would have thought of -- fantasizing about all the left fields out of which one surprise or another might come. But while anything is possible, and while surprises will certainly come, it is only the calendar that is starting fresh with a brand new page, not life. Life is well underway and for the most part is simply carrying forward.

Still, the interruption of the holidays and all their space apart has been beautiful, and the pause restoring. And though the field is out there in front of me waiting, stretching seemingly infinitely ahead, I still hesitate to take that next step -- to leave that first track in the snow. After all, at this point, everything is still utterly and completely perfect -- just how I imagined it to be.