Jamie Tobias Neely: New year brings fond memories, new direction

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which are willing to sacrifice something.”

John W. Gardner, a former U.S. secretary of health, education and welfare, wrote these words. He believed each of us must create our own meaning in life.

I agree with Gardner, yet I must add another observation. I believe meaning also derives from the contributions – the reactions, the advice, the admonitions, the kindnesses – of those who surround you.

Today I say farewell to these features pages and to the generous people who have joined me in this work for the last 20 years. As 2006 draws to a close, my tenure with the features department of The Spokesman-Review also ends.

At the start of the New Year, I will move to this newspaper’s editorial board. As an associate editor, I’ll write editorials and columns for our opinion pages. Soon I’ll pack up my desk to move to another floor of these lovely old buildings.

So this is the last column I’m scheduled to write for the Today section. Beginning in January, I hope you’ll watch for it on the Opinion page, where it will alternate with Rebecca Nappi’s column every other week.

As career transitions go, it’s a relatively simple one. I’m excited and happy to begin. And yet, for me, it’s the end of an era.

It began with a phone call in 1986 from the newspaper’s features editor at the time. The features pages needed some part-time editing help; would I be interested?

Absolutely.

Over the next 20 years as a writer and an editor for these pages, I was allowed the chance to throw open a window on the life of this community. I discovered a wide, diverse group of people who invited me to think, to learn and to grow.

They began with the people who gave me this place to work and the space for my words. Most recently, they’ve extended to the readers of this column, who have astonished me with a steady stream of phone calls, letters and e-mails. These readers have written the warmest words of encouragement you can imagine as well as the occasional stinging rebuke. A recent one made me laugh. “Ms. Neely,” it began. “First off I’d like to know where the sand pile is you’ve have had your head buried in for the past five years.”

They’ve each helped me understand what it means to be a community engaged in the conversations that have the power to enrich us all.

I have found meaning in my relationships with my bright and creative colleagues, who have celebrated with me during the good times, supported me during the bad, and shared their editing, their humor and a veritable elf factory of cookies. We’ve endured sad times of losing colleagues to downsizing and layoffs. And this fall, we suffered the very worst – the unexpected death of our colleague and friend, Laura Crooks. We filed into her funeral together, and we miss her still.

Meaning came as well from the hundreds, maybe thousands, of people I’ve interviewed in the last 20 years. This role allowed me to ask questions I’d rarely have the opportunity to broach otherwise. In return, my sources honored me with truth and authenticity.

I’ve asked sick men about dying and gay ones about love. I’ve pinned down theologians on sex and mercy and psychologists, sociologists and philosophers about how and why we live as we do. I’ve talked with black people about race. I’ve asked Arabs about terrorism. I’ve asked victims about violence and aggressors about nightmares. I’ve glimpsed the enormous courage of the mothers and fathers of military members stationed in Iraq, and I’ve listened to their strategies for surviving the anxious days and finding sleep at night.

I’ve discovered meaning in the essential humanity I’ve witnessed. It’s bubbled out of the rich mix of life we’ve shared: laughter and sorrow, excellence and failure, firmness and compassion, humor and wisdom, anguish and joy.

If you’re reading this column today, you’re one of the many, many people to whom I offer my gratitude. That group includes, of course, those who have carefully edited my words and written their clever headlines.

Now as 2007 begins, I invite you to visit me in my new space. I’m reassured to know my wonderful features colleagues will be only three floors away. And as for you, my thoughtful reader, I hope you’ll open the Northwest section, flip back to the letters to the editor and then look to your left.

Please keep your responses to this work coming. I am excited to search out the meaning in this next phase of my career. With your help, I know I’ll find it.