Have you ever had a year – or two, three, four of them in a row, even – that you felt were just… lost?  By lost I mean it's like you wandered into the middle of it looking for something, forgot what it was, then decided to just hang around for a bit, waiting to remember. Then maybe another year slips by and you're still not sure what you're doing there...

There are years we feel like nothing significant happens. Years we feel like we're doing little more than going through the motions. Maybe we’re just trying to cope.  Maybe we – or someone close to us – is unwell, physically or mentally.   Maybe we forgot (for ten thousand minutes or so) how to be brave and make other choices. Or maybe we are just… tired.

Whatever the case, we mark it as lost time; swaths of time we wander without navigation. Maybe - like me - your head is so not in the game you can hardly remember what even happened during those years.

I’m thinking about all this so-called lost time because I’ve just come from a bunch of aimless years in a row. Years where I did not take the wheel, where I was not “the boss of me.” Years where I didn't have it in me to do anything but just kind of exist. I was alive but not really living.  I’ve spent a lot of time feeling badly about all of this; about not being able to have been someone other than who I was.

Maybe it’s a kind of mourning to beat ourselves up for all that (fill in the blank) misused/underused/non-renewable/wasted/lost time. Whatever it is, it's not helpful.

I would dearly like to reframe those years for all of us.  Hating yourself is exhausting and my appetite and stamina for it has diminished greatly. I’ve lost the taste for endless, in-depth examination of all the things I didn’t do and choices I didn’t make; for decisions that feel like two (or fourteen) steps backwards. 

Because here’s the thing: ultimately it’s a soul’s journey we’re talking about, and it's trajectory is always linear. It can only travel in one direction, and that is forward and searching. A soul can't know “backwards” or “lost.”

Flying between New York and LA, you can't feel the average 600mph cruising speed in a 737 jet. Which is to say, just because you can’t feel forward motion, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

We can't recover lost years physically, but in this context, we can't "lose" them either, even the seemingly directionless, empty ones. They all have meaning. They are all leverage for our future selves.

The older I get, the easier it is to extend understanding and compassion outward and spread it around. So why not extend some towards myself?  We should probably all start there, because - of course, right? I’m sure compassion is like the old saw about love – “You can only truly love (extend compassion to) someone else to the extent that you love (extend compassion to) yourself…” Like that.

I recently read a bit from Kurt Vonnegut’s Letters. Divorced from the mother of his children, it’s a series of letters he wrote to his daughter Nanette in the early 1970’s. It’s his effort to close the physical and emotional distance between them, dispensing love and fatherly advice from afar.  And there was this:

You’re dismayed at having lost a year, maybe, because the school fell apart. Well, I feel as though I’ve lost the years since Slaughterhouse Five was published, but that’s malarkey. Those years weren’t lost. They simply weren’t the way I’d planned them. Neither was the year in which Jim had to stay motionless in bed while he got over TB. Neither was the year in which Mark went crazy then put himself together again. Those years were adventures. Planned years are not.

I am completely cheered by this idea!

I like the reminder that some adventures (the most significant ones?) are only internal. From the outside, it looks like nothing much is happening - never mind that you’re scaling mountains and outsmarting ravenous lions on the inside.  There is nothing “intentional” about the way time is passing.  Because it’s time unplanned  it is, by definition, directionless.

We can’t “feel” oxygen, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Likewise, just because a year doesn’t “feel” meaningful, doesn’t mean it isn’t.

I propose we stop talking about “lost” years, and instead talk about them as “lying fallow.”

When a field is in fallow, it’s basically a big swath of untended dirt. To the uneducated, it can easily look like a neglected bit of earth; a wasted or lost  year of potential growth.  A fallow field is one “that a farmer plows but does not cultivate for one or more seasons to allow the field to become more fertile again.” 

The farming practice of letting fields lie fallow is ancient. Like, medieval, ancient. A traditional three-field rotation system (still used in small scale farming today) is where one field is always fallow. Why? Because using soil over and over again depletes its nutrients! “All other factors being equal, fields that lie fallow tend to produce better crops the next year.”

Use yourself vigorously year in and year out and you will deplete your essential nutrients!

Sometimes life hands us a fallow year or two. Or five… You can't live in a state of perpetual cultivation! Fallow years are time to regenerate, rebuild and recreate yourself. Quietly. Internally. Let’s all let go of the notion of “lost,” embrace the idea of inside adventures, put the “allow” in fallow and lay some compassion on our not-as-hopeless-as-we-think selves.

You are an ancient organism and there are forces at play wiser than you know. Go easy on yourself.

Because here’s what’s true: Some years we’re a gorgeous bumper crop of wheat. Some years we’re the field of dirt. And we all need one to feed and grow the other. -xx