Reflections on "Closure"

I read a piece of blogging advice some time ago. One thing it said was: "If you have a lapse in your blogging, don't call attention to it with any explanations (for who cares?). Just jump back in." Well, as I ignored the rest of the advice ("make sure to repeat lots of key words so you rise up in the algorithms for Google searches"), I'm ignoring this one, as well. 

I drifted away from blogging toward the end of last year as part of a larger reconsideration of my entire career as a children's book author and scholar - of my entire LIFE! But now it's the first day of a new month, time to start a whole NEW LIFE, so here is the post I would have written on January 1, if I had been in a blogging mood then.

My poet friend Molly Fisk promotes the practice, not of making a resolution, but of choosing a word for a new year: a word to ponder, to reflect upon, to live with as a thought-provoking companion. Actually, she says sometimes it's not so much that you choose the word, but the word chooses you.

The word that chose me was "closure."

I was discouraged about my career as children's book creator and as children's literature scholar. The world of both authors and scholars was changing so much, and I was feeling too old and weary to change along with it. I was also (joyously) distracted by suddenly, shockingly, stunningly, falling in love in a totally life-transforming way. So: did I even WANT to be part of this changing world? And if I did, did it still want ME? 

One of my friends found out her husband was retiring when she heard him say, in a phone conversation, "Well, I guess it's time for me to hang up my spurs." Maybe it was time for me to hang up MY spurs and ride off into the sunset. When I took early retirement from my career as a tenured philosophy professor almost a decade ago, I told myself not to think of this as "retirement" but just as a career change. My self-given command was: "Do not go gentle into that good pasture." Now I found myself asking, "What's so bad about the pasture?" The pasture was starting to sound awfully alluring. It might be time to think about discovering some satisfying form of closure on the life I had lived for so long. 

Another poet friend offered a writing prompt for January 1 that went like this: "fences that close, fences that open, pastures beyond." Ooh! THAT'S what I needed to be thinking about for this new year!

I've been thinking about this for two months now. In future posts, I'll share some of what I've figured out about what closure is coming to mean to me - and how different this is from what I thought it would be. Maybe it isn't closure at all? But whatever it is, I think I'm liking it....