Hello, friends! When I was a kid, my friend used to pin a piece of paper with the year on it to a teddy bear. At midnight on NYE, he'd drop kick it into a box and then put it away until the next year. I did not bring that back on Friday night, but it would have been fitting. 2021 was a very hard year for me. Although a lot of good things happened to me along the way, I am not sad to put this year behind me.
I'm not feeling particularly optimistic about 2022 at this point. More good things will happen. The pandemic will continue to be a rollercoaster. The mid-term elections in the US will probably make me sad and angry. Maybe the new normal is being, as Mister Potter called George Bailey, a "warped, frustrated young man." If that's where I am in life, so be it.
Most years, I greet the new year with some optimism. Yes, it's an arbitrary point in time, but we can still give it meaning. It's an opportunity to reset just as much as Friday afternoon is an opportunity to shut the laptop and not think about work for a couple of days. It has no intrinsic meaning, but we give meaning to it by agreement. But this year…eh. Time moves on no matter how I feel about it. I'll move into 2022 because I have to. But I don't have to be excited about it.
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