Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Twelve hour drive home yesterday after visiting Megan, Ryan, Tracey and Steve in the Low Country. 20ish degree high for the day, much too cold to brave the garage gym. A few errands, 11 or 12 newspapers to get through, groceries and laundry, a possible EPIC step toward landing the plane, and all of a sudden I realize, no “musings…”!

I came upon this gem and I think it is as applicable today as it was some 10+ years ago. Did you make any resolutions? I did. Well, sorta kinda did. If I didn’t work out today does that mean I already punted one of the big ones? For whatever it’s worth I’m off tomorrow and will doubtless squeeze something that looks like exercise in, so I’m going with “no” on that one. Last year ended pretty OK, and so far 2025 is starting off pretty OK, too. I’m just gonna go with that.

So rather than stress myself out by postponing a well-deserved, much welcomed “Sideswiped” I’m just going to help myself (and you) to a little dish of New Year’s leftovers with this re-post from the past:

Tons of random stuff banging around between my ears, so much that it’s a little difficult to wade through and make sense of any of it. One little thing keeps bubbling up to the surface, long enough at least to be noticed: the lowly comma. Mathew McConaughy describes himself as a “comma person”. I get that.

What with all of the New Year’s resolution action, here and, well, everywhere, it can get to feeling like there really is a discreet finish to a year. A ‘period’. Full Stop. Does it seem like that to you? Everyone gets all in a rush to finish off a year, in this case 2013, so that they can get started on the next one. All kinds of retrospectives, writ large and small, come cascading down at the end of the year. As if it really was an end. Capped by a ‘period’, you know?

The thing is, though, that I don’t really feel all that different. It doesn’t really feel like anything was all that completed on December 31st. Or, for that matter, like there’s any huge new start, re-boot, or even a mulligan just after that ‘period’. Sure, there’s a really convenient opportunity to take stock, maybe make some adjustments or even re-route, but the longer I’ve been at this New Year thing the less it seems like anything is ever really at Full Stop.

More like a pause. That’s it. Not a ‘period’ so much as a ‘comma’ leading into whatever comes next.

A sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, or the whole darned story ends with a period. The year is over and the last box has been checked, but the story continues on New Year’s Day. Even the most severe pivot is still connected to the other side of the angle, the beginning of the line. The line, the sentence, the story and the life do not really stop at all; New Year, Birthday, whatever. We may pause, indeed we do pause, sometimes quite often. Full stop? Nah. Not us.

That’s what’s got me thinking about the comma. The story goes on and on, one big run-on sentence with an occasional pause but never a stop. It’s connected front to back, side to side, and start to finish by those pauses, by the lowly comma. I think I get what McConaughy is getting at. New Year’s Day is a comma place for sure, but neither time nor life hits a ‘period’ there, either. We just keep on going. The comma means there’s more to come.

I think I might be a “comma person”, too.

And there you go. Not bad, eh? Seems like I used to be pretty good at this “musings…” stuff. For what it’s worth when I re-read this I found myself nodding along. I will likely never have the pleasure of meeting Mr. McConaughy, let alone chat with him, but heretofore I’m going to think of the two of us as “brothers in comma”.

Happy New Year. I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 5th, 2025 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.