Happy New You!
A whole new year! A whole new metaphor! A fresh start! Just like last year!
Time to start being the perfect you. The better you. The you that eats well and works hard and reads more and gets to bed on time and never forgets the name of your local barista. Time to fill your days with the best version of yourself - lithe and wakeful and generous and smart.
On the other hand of course: time is a construct, the calendar was invented thousands of years ago by a nerdy Pope, and the concept of a “new year” is arbitrary semantics designed to make us feel better about the fact that time is rocketing all of us towards the mystery of our own demise.
Sorry about that. Point is: none of it really matters - and that’s a good thing. The new can be a lovely starting point, the metaphor can be a helpful motivator, but the idea that your messy life is an unsightly humiliation in the place of a version of yourself that you wish you could be is potentially a little bit stressful. Really, none of it matters. Not really. This is a Public Service Announcement.
What matters is someone in a bakery saying “You know what? Have this one too. No charge. Really nice with a raspberry jam, that one.”
What matters is the way fruit looks in a basket.
What matters is how you learn a new word and then suddenly you hear it everywhere.
What matters is when you’re on the phone or you’re in a meeting or you’re listening to someone and you do a really rather brilliant doodle. When everything about the doodle comes together - the way the ink curves, the slightly abstract concept, the fact that you didn’t keep going after you realised it was good and make it terrible again. And now you’ve got a napkin or an envelope or whatever with a rather good doodle on it and it’s not art but it’s not scribble and maybe that makes it art and you don’t want to throw it out so you leave it somewhere in case someone comes along and says it’s a Really Rather Good Doodle.
Hot pizza.
Hilarious idiot friends who call you by a name that is the same name everyone else calls you but it feels a little bit more correct. A little bit more you. A little bit more like something you came up with together.
There aren’t many things that matter more than watching a gum leaf travel downstream.
The discovery of posh soap in a café bathroom: gold.
Friends who you only realise when you’re walking away from them did not say a single thing about themselves at all.
People utilising items from elsewhere as outdoor furniture. Turkish rug spread out beneath a tree on the grass, huge comfy couch, little side table, feet in a paddling pool.
Two people doing sign language to each other from a distance. The universal hand signal for “another drink?” for instance.
Clean hair, fresh pyjamas, shiny faces. Not just on kids. The feeling of having clean hair, fresh pyjamas and a shiny face deserves to always be in the Top 20 feelings of all time.
Here’s a thing that matters: a long, solitary walk. Scientists are forever studying the benefits of walking and the benefits of solitude. We live in a world conspiring to avoid both these things. Why not combine the two and smash the dominant paradigm by going for a stroll.
Another thing that matters, especially at this time of year, regardless of the “new year“ metaphor is that great Australian meteorological miracle and conversation starter: the cool change.
And stone fruit.
And outdoor theatre in the park.
And picnics.
And places that buy a massive thing of sunscreen and you can just help yourself and it feels like a utopian wonderland because sunscreen is horrifically expensive and this feels like a huge gesture of public goodwill and suddenly anything seems possible.
And maybe your new year will be New and Shiny and Different. Maybe it will be just like other years only with different numbers. Perhaps somewhere in between? Maybe the metaphor of newness will be meaningful and maybe it won’t. It doesn’t really matter. None of it matters. Not really. You know what matters. Take a look around. This has been a Public Service Announcement.