Dare I write optimistically?
I’m not one to believe in things like luck, but there’s been an unfortunate pattern for a bit. I’ve written optimistic New Year’s posts for two years now, and have had some fundamental things about my world shaken for both of those years. The resolutions I’ve made? Sparsely successful. The biggest thing that I’ve accomplished? Survival, if I’m to be honest. Interesting, isn’t it, how you can look forward at your life at a given point, only to find yourself looking back on that point years or decades later and wondering how you could have been so positive. Yesterday’s optimism becomes today’s naiveté. And so it goes.
The thing that’s forefront in my meditation this New Year’s is an overwhelming feeling of time wasted, of a desire to redeem that time, somehow. I want life to work, to be stable, but not in the sense of logistics or the employment crises I’ve found myself in for the last two years. I mean that I want life to work in a larger, more wholistic sense…a more metaphysical way, if you will. I feel as though the experiences that I’ve had in the last two years have demonstrated that the road not taken in the Before Times may well have been the best one, and I’m trying to determine what to do with that.
So, my journal holds new year’s resolutions. I’m very hesitant to record them here. I’m hoping that, in a way I would struggle to articulate, things start to click this year. And that word is the beginning of the process: hope.
Such a small word to write, such huge implications.
I know this: yesterday morning, on New Year’s day, I woke up with my daughters and made pancakes for breakfast. Such a small thing, but something that they both love the three of us to do together, and something we hadn’t done in a long time.
Such a small thing to do, but such huge implications.
Here’s to 2025.