Welcoming a new year
A new year is a funny thing. Despite the fact that it’s really just an arbitrary way of marking time, it still feels like a new chapter, a new opportunity. At the very least, it’s a chance to approach the months ahead with an adjusted frame of mind – be it in how you tackle work, academics, your health, your relationships, or any manner of things.
Of course, 2021 is complicated by the fact that it’s riding on the back of 2020, a year which was pretty unambiguously difficult for most of the world. I’m not so naïve as to think that a new year means all the horrors of 2020 have suddenly vanished. However, I do think the lessons we learnt from 2020—particularly about ourselves and the way we connect with others—can help us manage how we approach 2021.
For me, 2020 was a year that taught me the value of simple pleasures. I don’t think I understood this truly until the beginning of 2021, when I spent a week at a house in Aldinga Beach with my family and a few friends. Maybe it was getting away from work for a while, or just taking a step back after the bustle of Christmas, but it clarified for me the things I hold as important: swimming every day, going for runs along the coast, making a coffee in the early morning silence, reading on the balcony, sitting around a table with friends under the night sky after a day by the beach, watching old movies with cake and tea, swimming in the rain on a cold day at a vacant Sellicks Beach, driving in silence with Lana Del Rey at full volume. These are the things which breathe into me a sigh of relief. Simple, good things.
Obviously, it’s not possible to live every day like that (that’s sort of what holidays are for). But it occurs to me that I could incorporate more of what makes me feel so good into my every day. I could run more, swim more, generally spend more time outside in the sunshine and the fresh air. I could read, make coffee, laugh with old friends, swim in the rain. I don’t mean to configure these things as a sort of New Year’s resolution, something to tick off. Rather, these are practices which I want to integrate fluidly into my life, not just in 2021, but all the time. It’s less to do with a singular goal, and more to do with who you are and the things which make you happy and light you up. That, at the very least, we can control.