For many years at some point in December I wrote a long “end of the year” blog post. Some of them were pretty involved and contained significant amounts of reflection and retrospection.
To honor this tradition, I’m still making a post. This is it.
However, it won’t be long this year. And it probably won’t contain significant amounts of reflection and introspection. The truth is that I’m finding reflection and introspection more difficult to do. I don’t know whether this is because both I and life are now so settled, so boring, that there isn’t much to say, or whether so much has gone on over the last couple of decades that I’ve simply repressed everything and would cause a therapist to say “he’s lost touch with himself.”
Maybe it’s a combination of the two.
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What happened this year:
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Endless work that I don’t love or late
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No improvement in the financial strip mine that is my life post-education
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Some time spent with kids paired with eternal regret that it wasn’t more
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The day-to-day struggle across all domains that is divorced-in-middle-age life
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Dealing with the day-to-day catastrophes and medical issues that come up
It’s pretty pat, and it’s frankly boilerplate at this point.
— § —
I’m sure there were some things that happened that seemed very important at the moment, or even during the surrounding weeks. The funny thing is that off the top of my head, I can’t even think of what they are.
I have lost my memory of what happened even a month or two ago.
I am living day-to-day, without memory, and without plans. Does that state of affairs ever resolve and leave one able to remember what’s happened in one’s life? I’m not sure.
— § —
Plan for the new year: have no idea what I want to do next or what I need to do next. React, usually too slowly, to everything. Live entirely in mind-off reactive mode.
Not a good plan you say?
What happens when you can’t come up with a better one?
Saying “you have no plan to learn how to fly by flapping your arms and then flap your arms across the english channel” is both true and a pointless statement at once. I think I’ve arrived at the point in life where I say to myself “most things are impossible; my life is what it is; now I ride it like a bicycle until I get home.”
Your bicycle won’t sprout an engine or a gold-making-machine or artificial intelligence as you ride it. It just won’t. It is what it is.
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I do think I have a deep resistance at this point to retrospective. It just feels counterproductive. As loss and sadness and trouble accumulates in your life, it becomes harder and harder to look back.
You just want to keep walking forward. It’s all you can do to keep walking forward.
So that’s what we’ll do.
Happy 2023.