The title is a joke – of course I wish everyone a happy new year. As I’ve mentioned before, our culture tends to make a big deal about calendar-based transitions and raise them to the level of important life events.
We do this in our financial lives – gotta pay those monthly bills, hope we have a good month, gotta get that form in before the end of the fiscal year.
But it’s always more poignant when that calendar year turns over. There’s an expectation that every new year is a truly new beginning – as if the universe has picked a spot where we can take stock of our lives, assign a rating to the previous 12 months and somehow push a reset button for the next 12 months.
This is stupid of course – world events, nor life events give a hoot about December vs January, or this year vs. that. Life is a continuum, unbound by artificial man made calendar concerns.
That said, being able to assess a period of time, learn from the mistakes and triumphs during that time and take a moment to regret mistakes and plan for some span of time in the future is important. We need to gauge our perspective, and adjust priorities and plans on a regular basis. It does us no good to wait until our final breaths – the insights serve no purpose by then.
So, here’s hoping 2021 will be a better year in terms of the battle against the pandemic. Here’s to hoping global trouble spots will find peaceful resolutions to their conflicts, and closer to home, here’s to hoping our government, and our country, can work to ease the ideological polarization that has plagued us for far too long.
Here’s to renewing our understanding that the people around us are, in fact, people like us, in that we all love our families, have friends, feel personal, spiritual and professional pressures. From that enlightened perspective, anything is possible – let’s prove it.
Let’s pick some bluegrass, shall we?
