At the end of 2018, I sat down with pen and paper and wrote a list of my accomplishments from the year. I separated them into Personal, Career, Athletics and Volunteering, for no better reason than those were the categories I thought up on the spot. I spent fifteen minutes or so writing down all that I could remember.
I had accomplished nothing spectacular during the year. This wasn’t a list of corporate awards, promotions and first place marathon finishes. It was just a list of the big things I’d done. My first trail race, a trip to Germany – stuff like that.
The exercise felt really good, and I’ve been repeating it each year since. One sheet of paper, four columns, and fifteen minutes to list out everything I did in the prior twelve months. Then another half hour to write down my thoughts about the accomplishments on the page. Simple.
There’s an element of ego involved, for sure. It feels good to feel that what I’m doing with my time is important. Or, if not important, at the very least measurable. “I did that,” I can say, pointing to the page.
But more than that, the exercise ties a very neat bow on a year gone by and makes it easy to move onto the next one. It captures the highlights of a small chunk of my life and lets me pause, take a deep breath and get started on a clean slate. Imagine a rest stop on a very long road trip. Or a big, red reset button.
Since I began a few years ago, I’ve come to realize how important this period of reflection is for me. I’ve started to look forward to the last two weeks of December, and the opportunity they hold to slow down the clock for a brief moment. The years will still blur together, but not before I’ve had a chance to look at this past one in a vacuum. And in the future, when I wonder where the time has gone, I’ll have something to show for each year that has passed.
This is particularly important now. The last few weeks of 2021 and the start of 2022 feel like some sort of twisted joke. We began the year with no vaccines, hunkered down and isolated from one another, and somehow here we are, one year later and still talking about testing and cancelled holiday plans due to COVID. It’s like the past six months of relative normalcy didn’t even happen. If years typically have a tendency to blur together, then the last two have just been one big, amorphous blob of time “in COVID.”
Think about that blob in more detail. 2020 was a year lost to quarantine, and 2021 was a year spent in limbo. We traveled, hung out with friends and spent some holidays with family. Thanksgiving was pretty normal. But it never felt fully right, given how much things were changing. Anne and I got married in August, in a room full of unmasked people. But as late as July, our venue still had capacity limits and mask requirements. It’s no wonder that David Brooks called 2021 “shapeless,” and that Adam Grant wrote the year’s most read New York Times article about the blah feeling we had coming out of 2020:
“Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.”
It’s like we’ve been living in the middle of a long, drawn out rainy day. Before COVID, each year was sunny with a handful of rainstorms sprinkled in here and there. Then 2020 came along and it poured from start to finish. Now we’re exiting a year which was overcast – with storm clouds on the horizon – but mostly dry for the final six months.
2022 is our chance to hit the reset button.
Even if you’ve made the most of the last two years, there are likely things you’ve been putting off until the return to “normalcy.” Maybe a career switch, or a big move, or a new hobby. In my case, I’ve been hesitant to restart two activities that I loved before the pandemic – running races and volunteering in-person – and I’ve avoided a long-time goal of mine, to become a better public speaker. I’ve been waiting for things to get back to normal. What good is a virtual public speaking class, right?
The truth is that a virtual public speaking class is pretty damn good for a world in which most work is virtual. Races may look a little different, volunteering may have more restrictions, but this is the world we’re living in. And by the time COVID turns two years old, we’ll have lived 2.5% of an average lifespan “in COVID.” It’s time for us to adjust.
Only we have the power to make this coming year a “post-pandemic” one. To separate it from the amorphous blob and give it shape. Have we eradicated COVID? No. But we’ve proven it’s here to stay, and we’ve developed the tools needed to live with it. So we need to start living with it. Things will be fluid for a while. Travel will have its ups and downs. Work will be stuck between the office and home. So be it.
Ask yourself: What will I make of the coming year? If it turns out to be cloudy – and with Omicron that seems likely – will we treat 2022 as another shapeless year? Will we keep stretching out this period of languishing, uncertainty and impermanence? Or will we pick up our heads and see that a cloudy future is just as easy to plan for as a sunny one?
A new year always brings with it an overload of pleasantries and well wishes, but don’t let that distract you from what it really is: a new year. Treat it like one.
– Emmett
Recent Posts:
2021 Reflection and 2022 Goals
“It’s a practice that I can no longer do without – it’s the best way I know of appreciating all that can happen in a year and putting some thought into what I want to happen in the next one.”
My Favorite Books of 2021
“Despite the mad rush at the end of the year, I missed my annual reading goal by two books – 50 of 52. It’s a far cry from the 70 I read in 2020, but a reflection of a healthier balance between spending time with others and spending time with my nose buried between two pages.”