Happy New Year

You’ve probably heard that mind-blowing fact about how when you condense the entirety of human history into a year, humans don’t arrive until that weird little period after Christmas and before New Year. 

We are tiny, even all of us together. Even all the people you’ve never met in countries you’ve never visited and the ones who, centuries ago, invented the things you now take for granted, like pepper shakers and medicine and hats. All of us. You and me and Marie Curie and Hitler and Ghandi and the first cavewoman to light a fire and all the people you’ve never heard of who could have shaped human history but who lived at the wrong time to be allowed that privilege and whose name does not therefore echo down the ages into the present. All of the people ever. Even with all of them, we’re tiny.

Public Service Announcement: Happy New Year! Don’t worry! Everything is tiny!

You being embarrassing all the times you’ve been embarrassing: not going to be remembered in the big History of the World year book. It won’t say: this person invaded Poland, this person discovered Radium, and this person acted like a total idiot at her work Christmas party. Remember: humans don’t even ARRIVE until mid-December. Unless you live for hundreds of thousands of years, you are not that important. No offence. None of us is - which really takes the pressure off when you think about it.

How much money you earn won’t make the year book either. There will be no pie graph like in a company’s Annual Report that compares us all. There will be no prize for best looking or most likes on instagram or best parent or most successful at romantic relationships and there won’t, sadly, be any prizes for most cups of tea consumed in a lifetime (am quietly confident, should this become a category).

Lil secret for you here too… some of the people who think they’re going to be in the year book, yeah, bad news for them, won’t be in the year book. This goes for your awful manager, your devious ex, your lying politicians, and that obnoxious person who talks over you because he knows so much better. The lying politician might sneak into the index but at this rate it will be under “environment, destroyer of” or “democracy, a danger to” so probably not a scene you want to be part of.

So if everything - bar a few dramatic eventualities - is too small to rate a mention in the big year book, what should we do? How do we spend out time? Well this is where the small things really matter, you see, because they’re not getting in the year book. It’s our job, then, to notice them. To relish them and enjoy them and document them and share them. 

Happy New Year: everything is tiny. 

The way birds carry on in a birdbath: tiny. Won’t get a mention in the year book. 

The taste of a really great combination of things in a sandwich: never should this tiny thing be underestimated. 

A sensational curry.

Watching a thunderstorm. 

Arriving somewhere you’ve never been before in the dark. The shapes and smells foreign to you but the stars, high up, deep and friendly. Somewhere, a bed.

A conversation you didn’t expect, with a person you presumed you knew enough about. That turning out to be wrong. You, talking to the person, that wrong presumption dissolving in your mind as you speak.

Raspberries. Tiny.

Holding a shell. A tiny architectural nature house thrown about by the monstrous sea but gleaming and perfect in the palm of your hand.

The feeling of having made somebody feel better.

Giggling with strangers.

Laughing with friends.

That thing where you’ve stood in line practicing buying the same sandwich you always buy and then you open your mouth and you order a completely new sandwich and you can’t even believe yourself and you’re already cataloguing the wrong turns you have made that led you to this Terrible Sandwich Decision - and then you take a bite and lo! Your brain’s reckless act of daring totally pays off and you look around to high five someone about your sightly different sandwich but it’s too small to celebrate.  

Watering a garden at night.

An animal sleeping on you.

This year might feel like a fresh start or a scary new chapter or a droning continuation of yesterday. But don’t worry. It’s tiny. Public Service Announcement: none of it matters as much as we think it does. This year, bear witness to the important things: thunderstorms and birds and raspberries.

This appeared at the start of the year in The Big Issue.