On publishing and Christmas

I don’t make new year’s resolutions. I used to, but not any more. It’s not that I don’t want to ‘change’ or ‘do new things’ or ‘have new adventures’: I just don’t see why any of those kinds of decisions needs to happen at a point in the year when I tend to be at a low ebb and energy seems harder to come by. If anything, I long, this year, to be completely ordinary. I’m stealing here from the evergreen and still-amazing blog of Simon Parke, who as always says it first and better and with fewer words.

What do I mean by ‘ordinary’? The church uses it to denote ‘the season of the Church year when Christians are encouraged to grow and mature in daily expression of their faith outside the great seasons of celebration of Christmas and Easter and the great periods of penance of Advent and Lent.’ I like that phrase ‘outside the great seasons of celebration’. I also like ‘daily expression’. They aren’t very sexy, instagrammable. They suggest hiddenness, a kind of dogged fidelity to practice that isn’t for show, but just is. That’s what I will be aiming for this year, not via a grand resolution but via small changes to habits that no one will know about but me.

God knows, I need them. I absolutely loved publishing my book of poems The Wind and the Rain last year. (Just as I absolutely loved Christmas.) But it kind of diverts attention, for me, from the real thing of just, well, getting on with it which largely involves reading, walking, taking the odd photo and staring into space. And waiting. Absolutely waiting for something to arrive.

Also like Christmas, the hoopla (what my friend Chris Southgate calles ‘folderol’) of publishing something passes very quickly. The build-up, the anxiety, the planning, the special clothes, the drinking on an empty stomach… It all goes. So quickly it’s over, Ted Hughes said, about the life of a salmon. As a prize-winning and very wise poet friend of mine once said to me, all we have is the process. I wish you ordinary (but brilliant) creativity this year, happy, invisible, sticking-to-your-guns and going-for-it creativity. I wish you boredom. I wish you peace.