2023 begins

The Paradeplatz tram stop at Christmas. Does UBS love us, though?

This is mostly a diary entry so if you're looking for content, just scroll on.

“Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” - Pema Chodron as quoted in this On Being episode 

...were words that kept coming back to me over Christmas "break." In quotation marks because I had a hard time summoning the holiday spirit. Christmas morning itself was really very wonderful but the rest of the two weeks felt like a slog through an endless to-do list that went right through into the new year and hasn't stopped yet. Also, it felt like a lot of things were falling apart. Not trauma-scale kinds of things, but...things. At one point I made a list:

• I remain broken up with my therapist, which is something like going off your meds I guess. I still think it was the right decision, but it hasn't been easy.
• Matthias the priest at church is getting sent back "home" to central Switzerland this coming summer. Very odd to think that my most change-phobic Swiss friend ("friend," whatever) is moving and I'm - still - not.
• A lot of what ruined Christmas break was the fact that the annual Baptism of our Lord service was happening at the end of it, and I couldn't quite get motivated to plan it, and ugh. It went well AND I swore that I'd never do it again, which will mean breaking ties with the parish entirely I think, and I go back and forth and up and down and around about this.
• My nothing-short-of-amazing oldest child turned 16 and age-appropriately believes that I am a visitor from the planet Complete Idiot.
• My differently-amazing second child is, despite his best efforts, in all likelihood going to fail the test to enter gymnasium, the equivalent of college-track high school. Which is fine, except that it isn't. 
• I was DEFINITELY FOR SURE going to write one of the four papers for my old theology classes during this break. Can you guess whether that happened? It's looking like they won't get written at all. Will the lack of this non-accredited certificate be the difference someday between me getting a job somewhere and not? Probably not? But maybe. 
• Something about my relationship with my parents. We haven't spoken regularly in years, at this point. Is this bad? Or just How Things Are? 
• In an effort to be more social in English I'd landed in a Qi Gong class on Fridays at noon, taught by a lovely Mexican expat in some mixture of the at-least-five languages she speaks. It was fabulous. Her family back home needs her so the class is going to end. Pooh.

To this list we can now add:

• Google laid of 6% of its workers in the US and the other shoe will drop here in Europe...sometime soon.

Are things going to start coming back together? or is this just the beginning of the falling-apart? I don't know. In any case the "letting there be room for all of this to happen" looks a lot like life in slow motion: more days than I'd like, evening comes and I realize that I haven't left the house. Now that school is back in session I'm getting a bit more time to, um, write blog entries. But never fear, only two more weeks before the kids are off again...

from my New Year's field trip to the labyrinth on the Insel Werd near Stein am Rhein