Normally I put together a little year-end poem for my final out-of-office message at work. This year all I could muster up for 2024 was a haiku:
A kidneystone of a year.
Farewell. Good riddance.
That seems a bit depressing, so we'll see if I come up with something else before 5 pm. What I'd like to remember of 2024 is that we welcomed Benny Beagle into our home, we saw a cool solar eclipse and several amazing nights of aurora, we built a new porch and deck, and that Monique and I have made it to the wrapup of this year a little the worse for wear, but still here and still in love with each other.
I live a blessed life and I'm keenly aware of it -- even in the midst of a day-by-day disaster like 2024.
I'm also a usually a pretty optimistic fellow, but it seems likely to me that we're all headed into rough waters in 2025. I'm going to give some more thought over the next couple of weeks to just what I want to do in 2025. I haven't felt very effective in recent years. I've mostly felt exhausted. But perhaps I can find a useful place to put my shoulder to the wheel and find an effective way make things a little better at some level in the world.
For now I'm trying to combat it all with pretty pictures. Here, have one of my favorites from 2024!
That might not seem very effective, but in an online world filled with possibly even more horror and anger than we see in the real world, some beauty to balance the scales can't hurt.
I've thought about dipping my toe back into politics. I've been pretty good at fixing things and building things in politics, but it seems to me that the next four years may call for constant full-volume screaming into the void. I could do that, but I'm not sure it would change anything and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like who I'd become by the end of four years of that.
I might try going back to some writing in 2025. Time flies and it's been quite a while since I've written any fiction. The last sustained push was a couple of decades ago when I wrote a few short stories set in a near-future dystopia. I set it aside for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was that it was a fairly depressing world to live in. Now that I find myself actually living in a near-future dystopia, maybe it's time to revisit it. (I wasn't entirely prescient. I thought it would take at least fifty more years to get to where we are now.) I'm not sure another run at science-fiction is in my future. But I might like to tackle something. We shall see. I fear it might devolve into what I mentioned above about politics: four years of shouting loudly into the void to no effect.
Hmmn ... time for another pretty picture:
Or I might try something else altogether. Whatever it is, I think my way of dealing with 2025 and beyond is going to be building something for the future, whatever it may be. For a long time now it has felt as if life has me on the run, ground down and trying to hold on to what I've got. That hasn't felt all that good lately. It's time to try something new.
Whatever you might be thinking of doing with your 2025, I wish you all the best with it!
Here, have another pretty picture:
