All due respect to Garfield and The Bangles, but I love Mondays. I love paying off my credit card and running my washer’s self-clean cycle the first day of every month. Despite not really (officially) planning any resolutions or putting on a fancy dress and attending a sparkling party, I love New Year’s. Ironically, I am not a morning person—but one could argue that a new day always, not just at New Year’s, begins at midnight, when I am habitually still awake.
A new day starts in the dark, and often in the quiet. But doesn’t everything start that way? Ideas start in the literal dark of an interior mind, seedlings start in the dark beneath dirt, new animal life starts in the dark of a womb or an egg. It takes a bit of faith—in deity, in yourself, in others, in experience—to have confidence at that point. To believe that the idea, the seedling, the new life will germinate and grow. To see that the world could be anything other than dark. That things might look different later, by another kind of light.
Sometimes, like a game of hide-and-seek, something new begins whether you are ready for it or not. (How wonderful that some things—like a new day—don’t demand anything of you to get themselves going. One less thing on the interminable to-do list.) I have met new starts unprepared. I have met them asleep. I have met them anxiously, unwillingly, with confusion and frustration. I have also been excited, peaceful, thankful, and glad. New starts are wonderfully relentless.
Fortunate.
Because while there is gratitude in the waiting, in the knowledge that you can always start again, there is work to be done. What do we do with our new beginnings? With our midnights? The ideas need practice, research, and fabrication. The seedling needs water and fertilizer. A growing being needs nourishment and safety. The potential is there. Potential to be something totally unexpected, or absolutely perfectly expected, or something a little misshapen but serviceable.
But before the sun rises—before you can see its shape—the day, the project, the seedling could be anything. It’s an irresistible moment. Sit with me there—just for a minute—in the pre-dawn darkness, hold your breath, and wonder.