Poetry & Eggs

Notes on overwhelm, essentials, and love

January does what it does and tries to destroy you. Everything piles on. The piles around you grow, too: the TBR stacks, the laundry bags of stained sleeves and pant legs jutting out at different angles, the clickbaity tabs and work files open on your laptop screen, the unopened bills and tax forms collecting dust on your desk. These clustered objects and obligations are remnants of your life, and there are so many of them now. You start to become overwhelmed by the excess: It’s all going to topple over.

And so what if it does? You think about how it feels to fall and the unbridled pain and promise that follows.

As it happens, you fall a lot in January, literally and figuratively. When the day doesn’t catch you, you sink to the ground. You clutch your stubbed toe or bruised knee or broken heart, but somehow you feel more grounded. You are now eye-level with what is essential, which is to say, all of those things around you don’t seem as daunting or urgent as you once made them out to b…