New Year’s Eve 2023

2023 has most certainly delivered its share of stress and angst, hasn’t it? But now it’s behind us.

Gone, but not forgotten, and its detritus and loose ends and ongoing chaos is likely to stretch all the way through 2024 and beyond. What worries me the most is that in 366 days (remember, 2024’s a leap year!) we’ll look back on today’s state of the world as “the good old days.”

But I’m something of an eternal optimist in the end. It’s probably a byproduct of my Catholic school programming, but I have to have faith that there will be good things (love, adventures, ball games, concerts, plays, travel) that will outweigh the bad (politics, wars, hatred, pandemics, Raiders fans). And maybe even some of those bad things will be defeated, or at least nudged back toward the light.

Despair is a danger. Getting so overwhelmed that we give up just allows the evil bastards to win, so I don’t recommend that course. It’s hard, but let’s keep our eyes on those good things, but let’s do it with our eyes open and our brains engaged.

New Year Resolutions? As we generally do them, it’s bullshit, so let’s not. Yes, we all want to lose 10 pounds and promise that we’ll exercise more. But we all know that by about next weekend we’ll be craving that pizza and not feel like getting off the couch on the weekend, so why set ourselves up for certain disappointment and depression? If you want a New Year Resolution that you can easily keep, try this one – “I’ll never vote for another Republican again, from President down to assistant dog catcher trainee, NO MATTER WHAT!” See, you’ve already improved the world and given yourself some peace of mind!

Instead of strict resolutions that will only get broken and make us feel like failures, let’s try to focus on self care and making our individual worlds better.

I had mentioned passions a while back – try writing down a few of those and thinking about how much you actually allow yourself to indulge or participate in them. When I did that I found that there are a lot of them that I’ve almost completely set aside (until “later”) because of “priorities.”

For example, “reading” is something I love to “waste” time on so much, but the To Be Read pile is growing much faster than things are being taken off of it and I’m not buying that many new books. I’m just not allowing myself the time to “waste” reading for pleasure.

“Flying.” Yeah, when was the last time I was in the left seat? It’s been years.

And so on. For me, “travel,” “music,” and “astronomy” are high on the list. While I make time every now and then for a taste, I rarely make time to really immerse myself and explore and grow.

So I recommend that we all spend 2024 actively, intellectually, passionately identifying the things that we’re missing, the things that we long for, the things that bring us joy, and putting in the effort to make time for those things in our lives.

Who’s with me? We’re taking back our lives! We’re taking back our passions! We’re no longer going to be satisfied with “good enough!”

WE RIDE AT DAWN!

Welcome, 2024.