New Year, Clear Mind

The transition between one year and the next always gets me feeling reflective and nostalgic. Rationally, I know there’s nothing really different between December 31 at 11:59 pm and January 1st at 12:00 am, and yet… the older I get, the more weight this moment seems to hold for me.

My guess is it’s because of a few things.

First, as someone who grew up in a bit of a rough situation, endings have always been hard for me. As a kid, I learned to fight and resist them because the pain of loss was just so overwhelming. But for humans, the experience of loss is, of course, inevitable. One day, each of us will die. Everyone we know and love will die. Our civilization will fall and be replaced with something new.

And beyond that, on the scale of the universe, even the things which seem from our limited perspective as near-eternal constants are actually ephemeral as fuck, like the existence of life on our planet. Or the light produced by our sun.

One day, they will all be gone.

For me, New Year’s Eve feels like a reminder of this inevitability. Its annual repetition like some giant cosmic clock, ominously ticking ever toward oblivion. One less holiday season, one less year, one less chapter of my life left to live.

But it’s not just the reminders of futures yet to come which give that moment its impact for me. It’s also the fact that New Year’s, like other holidays, acts as an emotional camera of sorts. Holidays create snapshots of life at a particular point in time for me. And each year creates a new snapshot which, when experienced collectively, can be quite affecting.

What sort of person was I compared to who I am now? Where was I celebrating back then? Who was I celebrating with? Who wasn’t I celebrating with yet… or anymore?

The ebbs and flows of lives coming into and out of each other’s orbit. The gradual changes which seem imperceptible in the moment but are so clear in retrospect.

So for me, the transition from one year to the next brings with it an immense awareness of my ephemerality, combined with an acknowledgment of how much things have already changed in my life without me realizing the full scope.

As the years have passed, I have learned it’s better to face these truths, and the discomfort they inspire, directly rather than hiding from them. Pretending they’re not there doesn’t make the problems go away, and it often makes things worse when you do eventually have to face them.

So what did all of that look like for me this year?

Well, apart from the usual existential dread (lol), it actually looked a lot like gratitude. A deep, powerful gratitude, the sort I’m not really used to feeling.

To make a very long story short, the last maybe five or so years have been a bit of a whirlwind for me, unrelated to the pandemic. And I’ve made a number of choices which at one point in my life would have seemed impossible or unforgivable, all in an effort to positively change the trajectory I was heading. The last couple years, but this year in particular, I’ve finally been able to see the fruits of my labors start to play out before me.

And I feel proud of myself and hopeful for the future in a way that is incredibly unfamiliar to me. I still have a long way to go, but I now know from experience that I’m more capable than I once thought I was.

So after the release of my short “Could’ve Been Claus” in December and a knowledge of what I’m hoping to accomplish in the next year of my limited life, I started 2024 with a bit of a refresh for my “project management” methodology.

Growing up in the environment I did, there are so many areas for me where the mental and emotional tools I developed as a child are not just completely inadequate, they’re actively harmful to the most basic levels of participation in life as a human being. I’ve had to do a ton of work as an adult to find, ingest, and deploy alternative methods to keep myself from succumbing to those deeply-ingrained, unhealthy ways of thinking and acting.

And task/project management is absolutely one of those areas for me. Turns out, “frantically running from one ill-defined task to the next with no rhyme or reason, hoping that my intensity of effort will somehow compensate for a lack of bigger picture organization” isn’t the most effective method of accomplishing goals.

So this month, I’ve been working my way through the revised edition of Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity and applying what I can to my life situation. I even got to feel like a “real grown-up” for a minute when I bought and set up my filing cabinet!

Honestly, the process for setting up that filing cabinet was alone probably worth the price of admission for me. It represents a method for dealing with all the mail and receipts and physical stuff usually cluttering up my writing space that I never know quite what to do with. It’s an organized place to just like… put stuff when I just need it for reference at some indeterminate time in the future but don’t want it in piles all around me. (Novel concept, I know.)

While I still have a bit more to sort through on the “task organization front” before I can consider this refresh done, I can already say I’ve got a better understanding of the scope of what’s ahead of me this year, both in my author life but also in my personal life.

And with the small wins I’ve had recently, I can for once actually say I’m really excited about the future, despite all the uncertainty.