Okay, NOW It’s New Year’s

tyunglebower ♦ January 8, 2018 ♦ Leave a comment

I write this a week to the day since most people ran in 2018. I myself was at a small New Year’s Eve party for the occasion. (Something that hasn’t happened in quite some time.)

I had fun at the party, but it came at the end of a quite troublesome span of days at the end of 2017. Perhaps someday, after I gain some distance from it all,  I will recount those events here in the blog, but not for now. Suffice to say it wasn’t good and a portion of it was rather bad.

This last week, since the “true” New Year has not been troublesome so much as chaotic in certain ways. This combine with the previous situation made for an end of the year/start of the year time period wherein I didn’t either celebrate or accomplish as much as I would have wanted. As much as I normally do.

Now I am not a “new year, new me” fanatic. In fact, all things being equal, I don’t get excited for New Year’s Eve. Being with friends is fun, but the “holiday” to me has always felt like one of the most overblown yearly occurrences in our society. Love Christmas, but the Three Days or so of New Year’s feel like the world taking a collective shit. Or something. Hard to explain, but obviously, I could fundamentally take or leave New Year’s as a holiday.

All that being said, there are actions I take at the start of a new calendar. I set goals (mostly writing ones) for the upcoming year. I straighten up belongings a bit. I clean up the computer. I engage in a degree of introspection and spiritual consideration, but I’m not consumed by it. In other words, I don’t usually have to rebuild my life, but in some ways I do reset aspects of it, to give myself some focus as the holidays close out.

This year, I couldn’t do that for January 1. So, I did it for January 8. Today. My New Year.

Which is the overall point of all of this. New Year’s is when you say it is. The calendar on your desk isn’t going to change to fit your perception, but it’s all numbers and subjective interpretation anyway. Just like how I continue to “do Christmas” until New Year’s Eve or so. I don’t get up first thing on December 26th and pack everything away, because I consider it to still be the season. That’s how I do it.

There are certain immutable truths to the universe, of course. But much of what we do involves overlaying our own vision over top of the surrounding landscape, and working from there. As I have done in calling this my New Year. As I do when I keep Christmas until the end of the month. As you no doubt do in some ways.

As all artists do, really. We see the world, we respond to it with a novel, a poem, a painting, which is our truth woven into or on top of the truth that life presents to us. It won’t always be as obvious as celebrating a personal New Year on January 8th, but to make art is to incorporate ourselves into the workings of the universe.

So, Happy New Year to you all.

Do you overlay your own version of the world into supposedly objective realities of your life?