“I don’t know how I am going to face this next year,” a friend told me recently. She is not the only one with a heavy heart. For many people I know, this new year comes with a sense of apprehension. In addition to personal crises and natural disasters, the election with its tensions and angry divisions has shaken their faith in our shared humanity. The unknowingness of the year ahead feels scary and unmanageable. Some of us are grieving the dashed hope of seeing a female president in the White House. Yet, when I think about all the turns that we human beings experience on our life journeys and the rituals we create to manage them, I find hope.
Thresholds, like the old year rolling into the new, claim our particular attention. They mark those times of transition when we leave the old but are not yet fully into the new. Turning points become in-between spaces that evoke a sense of ritual. We spontaneously think of old habits or situations we want to change or leave behind and losses to be grieved. We make resolutions for new intentions to take shape. It’s the stuff of memoirs we like to read and write.
As a family therapist I was privileged to be present to the struggles, hopes, grief and intentions of the turns in many people’s lives. Changes in marriages, health, careers, and family structures, tragedies and relational upheavals required a space where transitions could be honored and new futures faced with strength and resilience. Often therapy could create that sacred space, that important between time, where old demands, disappointments, losses and betrayals could be grieved; and glimmers of new hopes, possibilities and, yes fears, for the yet unknown future acknowledged and even embraced.
Many of you have read my first memoir When a Toy Dog Became a Wolf and the Moon Broke Curfew. You know that my family’s immigration to Australia when I was 13 years old, and the year just turning into 1951, was one of the major turning points in my own life. We celebrated that New Year’s Eve transition on board a migrant ship sailing for Australia, the promised “Land of Tomorrow,” where memories of the cruelties of war could be laid to rest and new lives created. “A boat load of people with empty pockets but hearts full of hope,” my mother liked to say. It will probably not surprise my friends and readers who asked for a sequel, that I begin my second memoir, Open Turns: From Dutch Girl to New Australian, with that turning point in my life. It will be published by SHE WRITES PRESS this coming year.
I lived in Australia for the next fourteen years until I moved to the U.S. as a young wife and mother. I have since lived in America for most of my life. Over the years, my time spent in Australia faded into a memory of a coming-of-age sojourn, an in-between time. But friends colleagues, students, clients and readers of my first memoir kept asking me, “So what happened after you left Amsterdam for Australia? What was it like for you and your family to be immigrants? Did you really spend a year in the Bush? Are you ever going to write that story?”
Their kind pushiness forced me to look at the significance of my time in Australia. How could it be of importance to others who might read my story? I was an immigrant, a teenager with emotional baggage and big dreams in a new land. I was a competitive swimmer and spent much of my time in the swimming pool. Could a story of a teenage immigrant girl in the 1950s be of interest to anyone today?
It is a story about adaptation, of loss and belonging, of confusion, acceptance and audacious intentions. And when I thought about it more, I began to realize how much a migrant, an adolescent and any person in transition have in common. I saw that this was not just my narrative, but the story of all of us trying to find where we belong, to discover our purpose, to navigate our individual way in a complex world. What inner hopes and intentions do we draw on as we face each transition, whether it’s the ringing in of a challenging new year, embracing the next phase of our life with renewed hope, or simply swimming the next lap in the swimming pool? How do we navigate those crucial turns in our life story?
Swimmers know the importance of turns. If you have watched swim competitions, the Olympics perhaps, you will have seen that. A swimmer who is behind the apparent winner can suddenly dash out in front after making a spectacular turn, or the swimmer in front can lose her advantage because the turn was not well executed.
As a young state champion swimmer in Australia my strongest strokes were the butterfly and breaststroke, which demanded that at the end of each length of the pool, I place both hands firmly on the wall, tuck my knees under, turn and push off with strength and agility. On land I struggled to adapt to a new language and unfamiliar culture, missed the friends left behind in Amsterdam, and hid the trauma of war memories that were foreign to my new Aussie mates. But I could relax in the present moment when I was swimming my laps, and I worked hard at maximizing those turns.
But today, when I swim laps at our local YMCA, I often use the turns to catch my breath before I swim the next length. I regard my fellow swimmers in the other lanes. Are they swimming for pleasure, enjoying the freedom of feeling their body glide through the water, or for reasons of health like the man with the long chest scar from heart surgery perhaps? Maybe, as it was for me in Australia, swimming laps is their individual way to deal with the pressures of life. The pool a calm respite, a space where the past and future relax into a meditative present and differences fall away, where we can access within ourselves the power and strength to face the unknown that lies ahead.
I take another breath and say a silent prayer of gratitude that I am still swimming at my age. I tuck my knees under and push off the wall with all my strength and I make a wish.
Life will always challenge us with its endless series of turns and transitions, but as 2024 turns into 2025, my wish is that each and every one of us may in our own unique way find a sacred space between the old and the new, a place or a still moment where we take a breath, regard those around us, and feel within ourselves the quiet strength and deep resilience that unites us.
Happy New Year to All!
Hendrika