Reculer Pour Mieux Sauter
Not not a New Year's note
I considered not sending this as its contents are officially outdated, but then even that fact alone supports my thesis. So, as we start the new year, indulge me in taking a step back.
The month of December is a bender, but one wherein I’m drunk on something stronger than my signature one-to-two hard kombuchas. Instead, I’m alit with throbbing, aching sincerity. Everyone’s dressed in their most earnest satin dresses and wool sweaters their moms got them last year! Everyone’s cheeks are rosy from the cold air and the second glass of hostess-gift wine! Every letterpressed card I affix to a gift for my best friend, my boss, my super, confronts me with the task of articulating what it is they mean to me — I have to write them three feet from my face so I don’t smudge them with my gushing Tiny Tim tears! “God bless us, everyone! Xx Kate.”
Through these compulsory weeks of loaded eye contact and soulful expressions and whispered confessions of “I just love you so much,” what comes next, at the strike of midnight on Boxing Day, is hedonistic, gluttonous navel-gazing, to restore balance. For me, it manifests in hours lost standing in front of my childhood bathroom mirror inspecting errant chin hairs, or perusing the spines of my bookshelf only to resort to fourteen pages of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban” before falling asleep on the couch, or for filling up online shopping carts with post holiday deals deals deals but never letting my Apple Pay near the things because Jesus, I’ve been shopping for weeks.
It’s the slowest I’ve moved all year long, my step count plummeting by half, and any step I do take feels completely devoid of intention. I’m wearing all the clothes I didn't take with me when I moved, each in some variation of ripped or stained and all completely musty. I’m eating meals composed of all the leftovers from a week of hors d'oeuvres — a bed of endive leaves deemed too ugly for the chicory boats, cracker-sized slices of smoked salmon, nubbins of Manchego and Humboldt Fog, all bejeweled with the pomegranate seeds once meant to garnish gimlets.
I feel untethered, and without purpose, but I think that’s exactly the point. The days between Christmas and New Year’s are like the hour gained in daylight savings — something that, somehow, though it happens every year, I fail to plan for. It’s vast, vulnerable, an open wound, an Achilles heel. All of this is found time, thus to do something productive with it would be absolutely clownish. Like finding $100 on the ground and putting it in my Roth IRA, rather than spending it on movie tickets and an eggplant appetizer to share.
There’s a French saying for what I’m doing in doing nothing — “reculer pour mieux sauter”; “stepping back to jump better.” Incidentally, I learned this phrase during yesterday’s three-hour marathon of “Emily in Paris,” a monumental step back in itself. I like to think that through this time of utter sloth and ennui, I’m simply accruing potential energy, pulling back like a slingshot, aimed to start anew with so much pent up potential. Much like the eleven months of normal cynicism primes us for a December full of gushing professions of love, this sacred, soppy six-day period is an essential evil, a launchpad for something new, and better.