Vox Meditantis

What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year?

Sunday, 7th December 2025

The flat holds that particular quiet that follows departure – beds stripped, mugs in the sink, the detritus of two people occupying space now reduced to absence. Michael rang from the car an hour ago; they’re past Wilmington, debating lunch logistics over Linda’s steady commentary. That ease between them – where conversation doesn’t require performance – still lingers in the rooms like good light.

The prompt arrived whilst I was stripping the guest room, tucked in the bedside drawer where I’d left it yesterday unneeded. What positive events have taken place in your life over the past year? It wants the sort that looks credible in summaries. Instead I’ve brought my notebook to the table where we sat yesterday – the one I’ve occupied alone more times than I’ve bothered counting – and I’m attempting something closer to honest debrief. Cataloguing, yes. But also noticing which items on the list I would have dismissed a year ago as insufficiently impressive.

The Ungrand Catalogue

Thursdays, to begin with. I said yes to Maggie’s museum project – designing stillness rooms where people are given explicit permission to sit with difficulty without needing to produce anything from that sitting. It’s work that serves no career advancement, requires rearranging clinic hours in ways that would have felt impossible a year ago. But it matters in a way I can’t defend with logic – the kind of work that uses everything I know about holding space whilst teaching me I don’t have to do it alone, behind a closed consulting door.

Every Thursday now, instead of the familiar geometry of the office, I move through galleries with Maggie and Claire, adjusting benches, revising wall text, watching people discover they’re allowed to leave an exhibit and return when they’re steadier. Occasionally someone uses the bench I positioned by the Civil War photographs and sits with the unnamed woman in the daguerreotype – the one who crossed the Delaware in 1863 – and I understand we’ve built something that honours not just history but the human cost of witnessing it.

The oral history archive came next. Volunteering my own story instead of safely curating others’. Arthur Bishop sitting across from me, retired shipyard foreman, both of us attempting to preserve what matters before time makes it irretrievable. Not as Dr Bennett the psychiatrist, but as Catherine who’s inhabited this harbour town for thirty years and has her own complicated relationship with staying put.

That small act – saying yes, I’ll be interviewed – required more courage than it probably should have. Mother’s voice underneath it: that Nevada girl who leapt before looking, reminding me some stories deserve enacting rather than merely observing.

Then the watercolour class. Tuesday evenings, seven o’clock, Harbour Street Community Centre. I arrived with entirely the wrong brushes and appropriate humility. My skies list sideways, my horizons argue with perspective, my trees look faintly apologetic. But the instructor simply says keep going, it’s meant to be difficult, and I’ve discovered that being a dedicated public novice at fifty-eight might be one of the bravest things I’ve attempted. Not because watercolours matter in any grand sense, but because I’ve spent decades perfecting competence as shelter. Learning to fumble publicly, to let incompetence be visible – this feels like dismantling architecture I didn’t know I’d built so thoroughly.

And the invitations. This took longest to recognise as positive, perhaps because it felt less like achievement and more like exposure. But I invited people into the flat for meals that were about presence rather than performance. Jenny from the library, who’s known me since primary school and refuses to let me hide behind professional talk. Priya the architect, who needed company during her mother’s decline. David for Bartók and risotto – careful-handed David who continues conversations in messages about deer in mist and Brahms concerts.

And Thanksgiving. The clearest evidence that something’s shifted. Cooking not to demonstrate competence but to create safety. And this weekend – Michael and Linda occupying the guest room I’d finally cleared enough to show evidence I’m mid-process, not finished.

Sunday Morning

I woke before the guest room noise this morning, made tea in the early silence, and sat at this table watching the harbour resolve itself out of dark. The flat around me felt like a question – what happens when the guests leave and the rooms return to their solitary order?

Yesterday, Linda touched Michael’s elbow whilst we stood watching the tidal flats. That brief gesture, eloquent enough for forty years of marriage – knowing his weather systems, what he needs, how to offer companionship without solution-hunting. She understands what I’m slowly learning: that intimacy doesn’t require constant interpretation or improvement. Sometimes it’s just being nearby whilst someone learns that rest isn’t moral failure.

Michael asked, carefully, if I was managing. I could have offered the professional shorthand. Instead I said something truer: that I’m learning to stop performing quite so hard, it’s uncomfortable, I’m terrible at it, but I think it might matter.

He nodded. Linda squeezed my hand. And we sat here whilst harbour light made everything momentarily kinder than it probably deserved.

What This Year Teaches

If I’m honest, the positive events aren’t positive because they’ve made me happier or more successful by conventional measures. They’re positive because they’ve made me more present. More willing to be seen attempting rather than achieving. More able to risk the ordinary intimacy I spent thirty years avoiding whilst calling it professionalism.

The year has been ungrand. No dramatic transformations, no cinematic moments of breakthrough. Just a series of small decisions to stop hiding quite so thoroughly behind competence. To say yes before I’ve calculated all variables. To invite people into rooms I’ve kept carefully curated.

Helen taught me that success looks like showing up consistently across decades. But what I’m learning now – belatedly, terrestrially – is that sustainability requires knowing what you’re showing up for. Not just the work. But the actual messy privilege of being ordinarily human, of letting people past the professional persona to discover there’s a person underneath who doubts, fumbles, is learning late that bravery isn’t competence.

Jenny still drops into Marcus’s café demanding honesty I’m not always ready to give. Priya still seeks company that doesn’t require her to perform recovery. David still sends messages about concerts and harbour walks. Michael and Linda still occupied the guest room, even knowing it contains evidence of grief I haven’t finished processing.

The flat is quiet now. Tomorrow the familiar rhythms return – consulting room, harbour walk with Father Walsh if the weather holds. But tonight I’m sitting with this: the year’s positive events are really just accumulated evidence I’m learning to inhabit my life rather than merely curating it. That safety might look less like control and more like the willingness to be seen mid-crossing, still uncertain where I’m going.

The light is fading early – December dusk with its usual lack of apology. Soon I’ll finish the washing up, restore the flat to its solitary order. But first I’ll send David a proper reply. Something about mid-week harbour walks when the weather holds, about whether he’s free before the Brahms concert for that awkward pre-performance dinner where we’re both still learning how to be in the same room without credentials to hide behind.

A small step. Micro and repetitive, not cinematic. But perhaps that’s what positive years actually look like – not the grand gestures, but the patient accumulation of small decisions to keep the experiment going. To trust that the best evidence of a year lived isn’t the list itself, but the willingness to continue attempting presence when performance would be so much safer.

The harbour keeps its counsel. And I – for once – am learning to do the same a little less tightly.

Catherine

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Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.