2022 is Here (or, Hell, I Need a Different Year…)
1. 2021 is a Thing That Happened, But Nobody Wanted It 2021 is gone. It’s back there. Submitted to the book of time for appraisal, and it will be found guilty of being largely a miserable affair. Some scholars might even say it was an avoidable mistake. Now, we’re in 2022, and unlike 2021, when I thought that maybe we’d get our shit together and push forward to some new future worth living in, I just don’t have a lot of good things to say about 2022. Omicron is here, and if Google statistics are anything to go by (pulled from NYT), we’re looking at yet another year of this shit. 824,000 people dead. Possibly as many as 50% of COVID survivors get some version of “long COVID,” which can, in some cases, be debilitating for months or life. I mean, just look at it…
New Year’s Resolutions: No More Intentional Misery
2020 is over. It’s dead. Time killed it. Thank the maker. Bye bye, 2020. Go die in a fire. Now that 2021 is here, it’s time for that magic tradition that many folks following: declaring New Year’s resolutions! I’ve declared these in the past, but there have also been years where I felt disinclined to do much of anything about the new year. But 2020 was an absolutely horrific year for a lot of people, and it exposed a lot of the activities and behaviors that don’t, for me, make life particularly excited. While I can’t control a lot of the miserable activities happening around me, I can make changes (or continue existing changes) that will make life less stressful, more purposeful, and more joyful. That’s why I’ve decided that 2021 is going to be the Year of Deliberately Manifesting Joy, continuing the mission I began in November 2020 with The Joy Factory and extending those actions across the spectrum of my life as much as possible. So what does that mean in New Year’s Resolutions terms?
2016: A Year in Review and Some Resolutions
In just a few short hours, 2016 will be over for anyone living in the Eastern Standard Time zone. For others, such as you lovely people basically anywhere east of me, 2016 is already over. For some of you, that’s a very good thing indeed, because 2016 has been a pretty terrible year. From political hellfire to celebrity deaths to personal disasters, so many of us have felt stifled by 2016. It wasn’t all bad, though. Some of you published books or stories, fell in love or got married or had a child, discovered something super cool, read a lot of great books, made new friends, ate great food, got a new and better job, finished college, and on and on and on. I’m right there with you. A whole lot of bad sprinkled with some wonderful things. Here’s a look at the things that happened to me in 2016: The Bad