The beginning of the year always creates a big mix of feelings, doesn’t it? Unsettledness and vague pain around the ending of the year and all we left undone … but then these feelings glide/elide/slide into freshness, this moment of the new beginning and all the good new beginnings represent. We can wipe the etch-a-sketch clean in one quick motion. So much freedom and relief in doing that; all the freshness is hope. Of course, we don’t need the excuse of a new year to do that — we can do it in any moment. But there’s something about January 1.
There’s one important feeling, however, that never goes away for me ––a deep sense of gratitude to everyone reading this, our very special tribe of folks whose lives are somehow made better by a matcha practice. I do think of it as a practice, much like meditation; it’s something we do often and repeatedly, each time offering us a freshness that makes us feel better (or at least does for me). It is you who makes this whole thing possible. You have blessed my life in more ways than you can know.
With love and gratitude in the air, I picked up Auden and saw this passage:
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
One could do worse for a life philosophy. Be the more loving one. Has anyone, ever, in human history, said, on their deathbed, “Oh I wish I had loved less?”
So maybe we can start this new year in this way.
