Choices

Choices

A new year and a time for beginnings.  This is my first blog ever – the start of a journey – we’ll see where it takes me.  I intend it to be a personal diary about topics that interest me, ideas, how we live now.  I hope that others will log on and comment to have conversations and perhaps create a community here.

January is named after the Roman god Janus, who according to Bullfinch’s Mythology, was a guardian of gates and doorways and thus had two faces, one looking in each direction.  The beginning of a new year is a time to assess the past and plan for the future, and so Janus is an apt symbol.  We make choices all the time about what to leave behind and what to carry forward.  We begin with very little baggage at birth and rapidly accumulate it; then periodically need to clean house and throw out things or send them to be recycled (hopefully) by others.  Clothes and other possessions, friends, jobs, where to live, trips to take can all be within our power to choose.  However, life often makes the choices for us – parents move and take us along, we have to leave one school and attend another, leave relatives behind; a relationships ends and we can’t stop that; we get fired from a job.

In Saskatoon, we will soon see the end of the Victoria Street Traffic Bridge.  It’s my favourite bridge; I live close to it and used to use it to walk to the Farmers’ Market.  It’s been closed for months now and the decision has been made by City Council to replace it.  That will take time and we’ll be without a bridge there for some time yet.  The old bridge is historic, it was the first bridge to link the communities of Nutana and Riversdale, the beginning of a union that would become Saskatoon. I’m sad to see the old bridge go and though I believe in preserving and remembering our history, I think that this bridge has come to the end of its life.  It would be expensive to refurbish and keep up.  We’d only be postponing the inevitable.

Every day we make choices about what to keep and what to let go.  On occasion we will rail against the endings “Rage, rage against the dying of the light,” (Dylan Thomas) but often there is hope for new light, the sun coming up a little earlier each day and going down a little later.

I hope for a new and glorious bridge to replace the old one, sending us on new journeys and leading to new connections.

Recommendation: The series of books by Laurie R. King beginning with The Beekeeper’s Apprentice, that chronicle the meeting and collaboration of a young woman and Sherlock Holmes from 1915 on.  If nyou like mystery and history, it’s a great series to curl up with in these chilly, grey winter evenings.