How was your year, then? According to my unscientific rule of thumb, that depends on your age. If you are young or young-ish, the odds are that your year will have been better than that of an older or old person. And the reason is very simple and obvious: age brings along many unwanted friends.
My family remains intact, although the year has been blighted by loss among friends, one in absolutely tragic circumstances. By and large, I have been lucky this year. Not everyone has been.
Close friends are living with challenging medical conditions and my thoughts are with them. Life can be so cruel and there is no sense of fairness or reward for being a good person. It is why I offer my thoughts, but not my prayers. If I thought the latter would be of any use, I’d join the local church tomorrow. So, as 2024 morphs into 2025, what have I got to say about it?
Well, Happy New Year, obviously. And if 2024 was bad or merely indifferent, then I hope 2025 is a much better one. But contrary to popular belief, I am not entirely stupid enough to imagine that the change of calendar in itself is going to change the world.
It’s like when people say things like, “I’m going to start a new life.” It sounds nice, except that much of the baggage you carried around before will still be there. In effect, you’re never starting a new life: you’re picking up the pieces of the only one you have, hopefully having learned a few things along the way, and running with it.
I certainly have no wise words of advice for you. My decision-making is often poor and that’s on a good day. Yet there some things I have learned as I lurch into my dotage.
While I would not say, live each new day as if it is going to your last, I would say that if you are making plans for the dim and distant future, then think about bringing them forward a bit. I am not saying that because you could die at any moment so get on with stuff – although that’s true – but I am saying that it’s not just disease and death that gets in the way.
These days I ache in places I didn’t know I had places and while we are on a long road to better health and fitness, the aches and pains don’t go away at all, which makes it that much harder. I have learned from long experience that a New Year resolution usually slips away into the ether, not always from one’s own lack of desire but one’s physical failings.
The best thing I ever did was to finish full time work some nine years before state pension age. Sure, there’s a financial hit, but frankly the accumulation of money for money’s sake has never interested me. Becoming a millionaire or just much better off would be nice, but I have no interest in being the richest man in the graveyard. I have done things and been to places I would never have dreamed were possible while I was engaged in the wacky world of full time work. That was a deliberate choice on my part. As I suggested earlier, leaving things and putting them off comes with a risk. Work is overrated.
Wishing each other a Happy New Year doesn’t in itself mean that the new year will be happy. It’s a nice, kind thought we express to people we come across. It’s a good luck wish, hope the new calendar year goes well. Tomorrow, when the sun eventually rises, won’t be any different from today. Nothing much will have changed. By lunchtime, we have usually worked that one out. What will shape the New Year is events, some good, some bad. We can maybe predict what they might be, even now, but in truth just expect the unexpected because things rarely turn out like you planned them to be.
I am making plans all the time, but they are not plans for years way ahead in the distance, those “one day we will do this and that” because, as John Fogerty put it, someday never comes.
I wish you love and mercy for tomorrow, for next year and for every year. For those struggling, I hope the struggles become easier to bear. For those dreaming, then keep dreaming, but just remember this is life and not a trial run. There will come a time when dreams, for whatever reason, can’t and won’t come true.
Thanks for reading the blog this year. 495 posts in 2024, 348,000 words and on we go.
I hope all your dreams come true, but just don’t wait forever. There’s no such thing as fate, the only reason we are here is because of the accident of our birth and our purpose in life is to procreate, that’s all. We are the lucky ones because most people are never born at all.
Happy 2025.
