As the year starts to draw to a close, I can be swamped with thoughts of what I did not get done, goals that slipped away, wonder at how fast another year is passing. But the wonder is usually outgunned by the critical voices, the deadline critters, those useful but seldom satisfied parts.

The need to achieve progress slips all too easily into our spiritual lives: where are my big leaps, growth spurts, lessons learned and integrated? I know in my gut that this is not how God measures things, but the mind can get carried away, thinking size matters.

There is a bit of a Walt Whitman poem that is inscribed on an amulet I have given as a gift lately. It says: “Now voyager… sail thou forth to seek and find.” Great for birthdays, big transitions, etc. Very encouraging.

I realize this blog appears Saturday, but on the occasionally well-organized week, I write it (or at least think about it) a few days before. This week, those before days included these odd bookends: Halloween and All Saints Day.

Designated days invite us to reflect or even behave in certain ways; this year, I was drawn by the annual, curious juxtaposition of these two days. I have never leaned into the Halloween festivities; the need to put on a strange, exciting costume taxes my limited and probably inhibited imagination.  But the notion of masks, "persona" in psychological language, haunts all our days, in ways both helpful and troubling.

In my mid 30s, I was being drawn back into going to church, after many years of basic cluelessness in terms of what church had to offer. I remember shyly making my initial foray into an evening Eucharist at an Episcopal church in New York City, and the seminarian preaching that night spoke on this line from Matthew 16:25, words from Jesus that I had never heard, and were startling to say the least:

“Whoever would save his life would lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Almost every week I find myself thinking about a wonderful Quaker concept, that of “way opening.”

It’s part of how Quakers practice discernment, as in, how do you know if you are supposed to do something? How can you tell, i.e., discern? If left to my own devices, and what I perceive (falsely) as my own, lonely, frantic effort, well… discernment is all about effort and thinking, and hard work, and angst.

On a recent trip the in-flight magazine had one of those Great-Places-You’ve-Never-Heard-of-But-Should-Know-About-in-Case-You-Want-to-Live-There-Forever articles… the kind of piece I seem to read compulsively these days. The author spoke about her own sense of home in Vermont, after years of living in various nice locations. As she put it, “They were great places to live… but they were not home.”