I love a reason to start clean. Like most everyone else, the end of the year is the best break line for doing it. It's the end of the tax year for one, so it is easy to start fresh with a new financial vision. Like keeping the books tidy or saving more—or giving more. Or, the end of the year is like a Sunday night multiplied by 50 or so: you just want to start off again on your own foot the way you fitted it.

How quickly the shoes come loose!

Two weeks ago I told a friend that the most troubling thing right now is feeling passionless. Feeling aimless. I don't listen to music anymore, really, don't long to get in the car or go for a walk with the music loud and transportational, for example. I long for sleep and, when I'm not thinking about work, I think of practical things that are helpful but not inspirational. Otherwise I am working or tired from working or stuck thinking about work, a job that is good and that I experience unambivalently as good but that truly is solely functional, a grindstone that never slows.

I told her my goal was to spend as much time at home as possible over the holidays, not working, to see what I find there. So I have, and there has been time to accumulate the energy to organize things and make plans. But no found romanticism or muse.

On Christmas we slept late and wandered out to the coffee shop in the snow for the upon-waking fix and then returned to a white-lit Christmas tree and a modest stack of gifts, which we opened slowly, with relish, in between bites of pajon (which I had made earlier) and between glances at the thick snowflakes falling past the window. It was all white, and quiet. I lit candles and oil lamps. Then we crawled back into bed and wrapped ourselves up tightly. We stayed there for three hours or so, napping off and on through four discs of Radiohead. We ate burgers at Charlie's and went to the last showing of Sweeney Todd.

My aunt holds Christmas on the 26th so that her granddaughter can attend. That means we got up the next day and headed out on the foreign feeling of freeway speeds into a bright morning. The light like that, the trees and colder air. The human sense of going away, of perhaps adventure, temporarily igniting some sense of being cooped up for months maybe, even though we did go all that way all that long in Japan. Maybe it was a hint of the possibility that if you just keep your foot pressed down on the pedal you could go indefinitely to who-knows-where for however long. I'm not sure what made the lightness.

Tonight: nothing. But I have been remembering the year I camped at the ocean and woke up by myself to a clear new year. I want to do something like that again but I don't want to repeat it and I can't think of something different and equally good. Maybe next year I'll think of the right thing.

My plans every Sunday multiplied by 50 are modest: Toward a peace, a progress. I give it the best I can and try to regroup at each rest.