Black satin bejeweled purse: Grandma’s

New Year’s Eve shenanigans with the FU Ladies @ Visual Arts Collective, Garden City, Idaho

I woke up as many of you did on New Year’s Day, groping for the switch to the coffeemaker in my darkened kitchen, my ears buzzing from the cilia-flattening effect of dancing to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” at top decibel the night before. I’m sure people have been waking up in exactly this manner since 1982, but the first morning of a new year somehow feels bathed in a different light. I cinched my robe at the waist and braced myself against the cold as I scuttled down my driveway to retrieve the New York Times.

Vintage 1940s Dress: In Retrospect (Boise)

When I pulled the Week in Review out of the fat middle of the Sunday edition, its headline shouted “The Joy of Quiet.” In this nuanced essay, travel writer and novelist Pico Iyer addresses why stillness is essential—perhaps more so in our 3G Age than ever before. I stretched out on the sofa, my knees creaking from a night of how-low-can-you-go dancing, and allowed Iyer’s words to offer me some semblance of ablution:

“We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating . . . . All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.”

But how do we get there—to clarity—from where we are?

4″ Wedge Heels: B. Makowsky (Marshall’s)

These geometric wedges remind me of a design by a coveted label I can’t afford, Maison Martin Margiela

“Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” Iyer suggest refusing distraction by learning to sit quietly alone in a room, which, as we all know, is easier said than done. But he also offers practical, travel-writerly advice. The future of travel, Iyer believes, lies not in the multiple Ethernet ports of a business suite at Howard Johnson, but in “black-hole resorts” like the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur, which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Other tactics? “Forgetting” your cell phone at home, recovering those hours lost to Facebook and Twitter addiction with Freedom software or old-fashioned willpower, and remembering that true joy in life comes from deep concentration: the two-hundredth page of a captivating novel, a languorous dinner with friends, the pleasure of vulnerable conversation that is all eye contact and makes you feel vivid, impossibly alive, and pinned in space to your coffee and chair.

Details, details, details! 

2012. Lord knows it has its naysayers, but I feel like standing up for the promise of this year. And it needn’t be complicated: drink when you’re dry, dance when you feel stagnant, sit still when you feel pulled in all directions; ask yourself, does it matter? If the answer is yes, go for it.

Costume Earrings: Grandma’s

Photos by Bethany Walter