Holy Enough (Go Suns!)

So that’s where I am, at the edge of a year, not making resolutions, not optimizing, not even pretending I know what comes next or WTF is going on.

2025 is wrapped.

It can be wrapped in chains and a cinder block, honestly, and sunk in Lake Pleasant. Like a time capsule where I dumped all my baggage, got Job’d (in the best ways possible—it could have been worse; I hope God is not reading this), and somehow left it upright. I’ll tape a Post-it on the inside, against the window that lets the future look into it, saying, “Note to the future: I survived this and was only moderately unbearable. Please clap for my sisters.”

I’m being dramatic, and really, life doesn’t unfold in tidy calendar years, but arcs that begin inside dorm rooms in 1997 and end in stucco houses in 2025. Time is a pattern strewn through a lifetime. Choices made, life lived, sometimes tidy, sometimes messy, sometimes thin, sometimes chubby. All of it honestly and with great effort. (Sometimes too much effort.)

Have you ever had a somatic time slip? I did a few weeks back. I popped the back off a picture frame and I slipped through time to September 2011, in a different house, light through different windows, but the feeling met me like it was fourteen years earlier and I’d not moved. It was just a moment but felt like a lifetime. I sat down on the kitchen chair and looked around me. Was I still where I started? Something inside me clicked off, complete.

The last few months of this year have been like this for me. Unravelling, unspooling moments of clarity, release, and somatic understanding. It seems as though my body knows a lot before my brain will accept it, and I’d probably be better off if I listened more.

On Christmas Eve, I went to my church, sang Christmas songs, lit a candle, and celebrated the Light of Christ entering the world. Then, I came home with the single mission of staying awake long enough to accompany Bertha to Midnight Mass. I put on a pot of coffee and decided to watch Christmas episodes from my favorite television shows. I started with Bones, the one in the first season where they’re exposed to Valley Fever and she solves a cold case and finds a $100,000 penny. Then, I thought about The X-Files and Lilly Tomlin and went to The Ghosts Stole Christmas, and that was all it took. It was a gateway episode, and I was on an X-Files bender for the next week.

So, that’s me. Been watching The X-Files on DVD like the world never invented notifications. I’ve not been interested in wearing pants or making plans. This is a modern cloister walk—but with pantless solitude, X-Files, an old ornery rat terrier, and somatic time slips.

Bertha and I did make it to Midnight Mass. I drove her there in misty rain, car lights orange against wet asphalt, Christmas music low on the radio. St. Helen’s is a mid-century church. It is lovely but doesn’t have that haunting sensation of older Catholic church. (You know, when you walk in and think, “Am I in church or a dungeon?” I like those churches.) We found good seats in the middle, just close enough to smell the incense and for me to be worried about so many people drinking out of the same cup.

I have no idea how to follow along to a Mass, but I tried. The music was modern, full band. (Also disorienting. I felt like I’d overtuned to a Christian contemporary station rather than NPR.) But once we got started, it was rejuvenating. Following along with something so old and grounded. Billions of people have said those same words every year at Christmas in the two millennia since the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

Tell you what I’ve learned the last couple of years: Deconstruction as a tool is awesome to dismantle unethical and corrupt power structures. But you can’t live in it. To try is like saying your leadership philosophy is a Six Sigma fishbone diagram. Instead, try rolling into a Presbyterian Church service when your life has been cleared out to the studs to find that structure is already there, just waiting. Like a Midnight Mass with one of your oldest and dearest friends when you’re both a little worse for the wear at the end of the year.

The rain continued to soften the edges of the night, and carried me into Christmas, where I enjoyed a lovely day with my parents and siblings. NBA Christmas Day took me into the wee hours, and we can circle back to the X-Files bender.

I’ve paused said bender to watch the Suns.

So that’s where I am, at the edge of a year, not making resolutions, not optimizing, not even pretending I know what comes next or WTF is going on. Just watching basketball and X-Files like it’s liturgy, letting my body finish its sentences, trusting that whatever is real doesn’t need me to rush it.

If this is a threshold, it’s a quiet one. No trumpet. No fresh notebook. Just rain, old stories, ancient words, and a sense that for the first time in a long while, nothing is chasing me.
Which feels… holy enough.

Also, Go Suns!
Refs, YOU SUCK!