For the past several years, it seems that when I've come to the end of each year, the sentiment that I feel most strongly is “good riddance.” To be fair, in the last half decade or so, we have all faced a series of changes and challenges, broadly in our society but almost certainly within each of our own lives as well, that seem abnormally frequent and intense. It is almost inevitable that our lives never turn out quite the way we hope or expect, regardless of what time scale we consider, but different doesn't always mean worse. A year is in some ways both too big and too small to fully appreciate. It is highly unlikely that in the course of 365 days we haven't all experienced at least some measure of both triumph and tragedy, success and failure, growth and setback, happiness and misery, pleasure and pain, sickness and health, peace and chaos. To boil all of those different things into one single impression of the whole year seems not only pointless but also impossible. On the other hand, a year is also too small of an increment with which to fully measure the shape of our lives. The things that matter most to us in the long run may take many years or decades to fully play out. Looking at a single year is like trying to judge how good of a picture is depicted on a single jigsaw puzzle piece. Maybe we didn't achieve every goal we had set for ourselves last January 1st. But we don't throw a puzzle piece away just because it shows us an incomplete and incomprehensible picture. We try to find a place for it in the grander puzzle. I give gratitude and reverence to the year that has passed. Some things are better and some things are worse than they were a year ago. And a lot of things have not fully played out yet. To paraphrase JRR Tolkien in “Leaf By Niggle”, this year could have been different, but it couldn't have been better.
