Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop

You can't stop time, but there are days I'd like to shut the expectations of the calendar off.

I do not want to sum up my past year in my nine best photos from Facebook. I do not want to come up with a word that perfectly encapsulates where I'm headed in 2016. Vision boards are just a reflection of the zoo of magazines you have in your bathroom. I am not in the mood to write 25 words that  spotlight my year, either, although it's a writing exercise that my sister does yearly and it's a fascinating challenge.

Network television and the internet today will be a firework of expectations and intentions. Helpful memes, handy lists, cute ideas like leaving notes for yourself in your sock drawer so you don't feel sad on Mondays. Fresh starts! Woo! Who doesn't love them? 

Everything in me says no to this right now, and my favorite word is an all capitals YES.

So, today I say YES to just being. It's ok for me to watch the squirrels peel bark off the tree in front of my window and wonder why they do it, to binge watch TED talks, and to eat the last three Welsh cookies without guilt or shame. It's ok for me to not participate in the forced march of bright displays of storage bins, or list making, or pork and sauerkraut wishes. It's ok to just be, to let the new year start quietly, maybe even sleep through it, because where I live now, they celebrate the last few minutes of the year by dropping a very large shoe.

A shoe. "Waiting for the other shoe to drop," is an idiom that came from tenement living in New York City. As one shoe makes a sound hitting the floor, the expectation for the other shoe to make a similar sound is created.

So we can assume that somewhere around here, there is another giant shoe, waiting to drop. We can spend the whole year waiting to hear that familiar sound, or we can spend it imagining that our upstairs neighbor is Lowly Worm.