Changing Course

Changing course

Often when I walk, wherever I am, I deliberately choose a route that isn’t familiar, as this provides an opportunity for discovery. One afternoon I came upon a bookstore just a few blocks from the Museum of the City of New York located in the ground floor of a charming brownstone. The books are primarily in Spanish and the colorful decorations and garden are enchanting. I have retuned a few times. On another walk, I came upon a French bakery tucked away on a street that would normally not be in my path. In the many years, I have traveled to London I have many favorite places, but always change my route to these locations so I can discover more of the City. In New Hampshire, I often select different roads, usually getting terribly lost in the process. Notwithstanding, this allows me to discover an antique shop, a stunning mountain vista or a small country store, that if it isn’t filled with things I might want, has a sense of history.

Now that we are just a few days away from the beginning of a new year, 2018, I think all of us, in one way or another, take an inventory of the year. There were moments of joy and there were probably moments of deep sadness and disappointment. And, whether, one makes resolutions for the new year, I can’t believe that most of us wake up on 1 January with hope for the year. “Hope against hope” in the words of poet Samuel Menashe.

Historically 2018 is significant because it marks 50 years since 1968, a year of seismic social and political change in the United States and across the globe. Famine in Biafra, the Viet Nam war, the death of Dr. Marin Luther King, a spaceflight mission that became the first manned spacecraft to reach the Earth’s Moon, orbit it and then return safely to Earth. These events, which changed the course of history, seem far in the past. Yet, we can scan today’s news and find famines in Africa, racial tension in the United States, space missions, that are now private, and controversial wars in several regions of the world. Perhaps a reminder of how difficult it is to truly change course.

When I reflect on 2017 I will remember this year as one that has been very significant for me. Not for an accomplishment or an acquisition. It was because during this year I was given the gift of time and space to read, reflect, play the piano and live quietly in nature. I will always treasure that time.

Although I don’t have an opportunity to meet all of you, the people who read this column, I think about you. And, it is because of the dedicated staff at the Laconia Daily Sun that you have a newspaper that can be pulled out of a snowbank, or in from a torrential rain or picked up, at no cost, around the Lakes Region. The editors, writers, columnists, designers, production staff and management who work daily to publish the newspaper. While you may not always agree with the news, or one viewpoint or another, it doesn’t make a difference. There is a newspaper available for you.

I wish each of you a new year, 2018, that is filled with change, because it is in changing course, in even small increments, that the world will become a more peaceful place.

“Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.”

Sing, Unburied, Sing
(Charles Scribner Sons, 2017)
Jesmyn Ward