I don’t know about you, but I went back and re-read my last column of 2014, and it was downright maudlin. Seems like I was in a bit of a funk as the year petered out—and maybe in that phrasing is the key to my mood. The last year didn’t close strong. It didn’t end with a kick or even with an exhausted collapse across the finish line.
It sort of stuttered and stalled and puttered to a stop.
“Might as well just sit down here,” we all said. “Even if we don’t go to it, that finish line is coming to us.”
The inevitability of a new year is a mixed blessing. It comes whether we want it to or not, and while some people might see it as yet another boot heel treading down upon them, yet another turn of the great millstone that’s slowly grinding us all down to a fine powder, others may see it instead as a fresh start, a soft blanket of new-fallen snow (you’ve heard of snow, right?) that covers over all of the mistakes and shootings and racial slurs and dirty fights and attack ads and wars and rumors of wars from the year before.
That, too, is a mixed blessing, since we don’t want to live in a constant state of heightened alert due to the chaos around us, but we also don’t want to forget the past, doomed to repeat the mistakes that cause us such grief.
So how about we look at the new year as a new light switching on—one bright enough to cause us to turn our heads and look in a new direction, at least at first, but not so bright that we can never look back and take stock of what we’re moving away from as we take steps forward toward a better future.
And how about I work on not drafting so many tortured metaphors and analogies in the weeks and months to come?
The Canary is feeling a little better in this here 2015. Send comments, ideas, tips, suggestions, and juice gossip to canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jan 1-8, 2015.
