The porthole

A reflection on New Year's Eve

On our last early-morning walk of 2023, Leo the dog and I took a new route.

I found myself praying: God, what is coming in 2024 … what are you calling me to in the new year?

Then I thought, Wait, wait, wait—first I should express gratitude for 2023.

Ah, 2023. I began thinking about all that happened: moving my parents to a retirement community, hospitalizations and hospice, my mom’s passing, my dad’s stroke and then his TIA and those recoveries, Leo’s near-death experience and recovery, growing pains for Max, clearing out my parents’ home and more ...

A phrase popped into my mind: annus horribilis—Latin for “terrible year.”

Queen Elizabeth II brought some popularity to the term in 1992, when she used it in a speech reflecting on a year of scandals in the British royal family. Not much later, my mom used it—almost tongue in cheek—to describe a year in which my brother and I had each given her fits in our own special ways.

The memory of Mom’s melodramatic moment made me smile. I’d argue that 2023 was much harder than that long-ago year, and yet still I can’t label it an annus horribilis. Along with the challenges, it brought blessings I would never have anticipated had I gazed into a crystal ball at the end of 2022 and seen what was to come.

That’s what I was thinking about when Leo and I passed this:

It’s a convex Plexiglas porthole installed about a foot off the ground at the bottom of a vinyl fence.

I assume it was installed to enable a small dog to peer out from its yard and see what is happening in the vast world beyond. What a sweet thing to do for a pet, I thought.

And … , it dawned on me, how like standing at the precipice of a new year!

We each run around our little yards of experience, of time past. We linger in the dappled sunshine spots of the beautiful moments, and we scratch away at the ugly parts and try to cover them up.

We are each standing in those yards filled with our messes and successes as we anticipate the fresh start of this new year.

But as we look ahead to the possibilities the future has in store, all we get to see is a tiny glimpse of what is ahead. As if through a porthole.

I remember reading St. Thomas Aquinas my freshman year in college and being blown away by his writing on time. What I recall is that where humans live in chronologic time, moment by moment, able only to see a small amount, God is timeless, seeing everything—past, present and future—all at once.

Put another way (not sure if this was Aquinas or something I heard in class), we humans experience time as a series of rooms, walking from one into the next and the next, unable to see what’s ahead. God floats above the rooms, unconstrained by walls or ceilings.

After 2023, I feel thankful for the walls, thankful not to have a crystal ball.

I’ll stand at the little porthole in my fence and welcome 2024 bit by bit, as it comes.  

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