The New Year
During this odd liminal time between Christmas and the New Year, the mind cannot help but turn toward wondering about what the latter will bring.
It’s coming.
The holidays are over or largely behind us, perhaps a few days left to enjoy.
Soon it will be the New Year, this odd arbitrary thing we do this time each year, turning over the page of one calendar in favour of the next.
Every year is unpredictable.
That lesson was well and truly learned by the world in 2020, when if you were anything like me, you imagined a whole slew of things that might happen, and not one of them was a global pandemic that would shut. Everything. Down. For weeks, and leave us forever changed.
In fact, as 2020 began, COVID had already started, as the first case was in November 20219. The majority of the world was just as yet unaware.
So here we are in year 7 of a pandemic many desperately wish to be over, to have been concluded decisely nearly three years ago, but in fact because of which more and more people struggle with Long Covid, their lives forever changed.
As devastating as Covid and all its sequelae have been, it is not the only world crisis that has intensified recently.
The environmental crisis that has been looming since my childhood in the 1970s is at a level now when the 1.5 degree increase that was so feared in 2019 is inevitable, and a much higher increase seems imminent. The Russia-Ukraine war and the Palestinian famine continue, along with many other local wars, famines, and disasters in countries all over that don’t get as much press.
No wonder, then, that. every year since the big 2020 reveal, humans approach the next year with much less optimism and much more apprehension.
And yet.
There is a curiosity that cannot be denied.
What will the New Year be this time?
Will this be the year my writing finally gets into gear?
Will singing become even more of a thing for me than it has been last year?
What will happen as the first year of the course really takes shape?
And of course, there are all the questions I have no idea how to ask, as the coming unknowns compound over time.
One thing that worked out really well last year as a January initiative was getting steps in daily. Before that, I used to feel really successful for getting out to walk four days in a week. Now, the expectation is to walk 7 out of 7, and the practice of it has changed the fabric of my weeks.
The space provided by the daily meditation in order to write afterward has been a welcome change as well over the past months I have been combining them. The spiritual direction a fourth important and positive contribution to my ongoing wellness. The communities of church, choir, and the meditation group fifth, sixth, and seventh. All of these over the past 12 months have been working together to make my life a very different landscape than 2024 was for me.
So how can I not be curious about what is coming next, when this past year of turning 60 has been so mindblowing?