We recently transitioned into a new calendar year. Most years, while I don’t do much for the occasion, I do stay up late and wait for midnight. I also often sip a little bit of sparkling wine. But this year something in me was very different. I didn’t stay up and in fact didn’t at all want to.
I just wanted to go to bed.
I feel like this has been a theme for me over the past 8 months or so. Somewhere around April of last year, after having to travel multiple weeks in a row for my dad, a wedding, and work, I totally crashed and burned. I never got to recover, either, because the travel continued all summer, and then my mother-in-law died and I had more back-to-back travel plus an out-of-state funeral.
And then we moved. Again. To yet another state. So I really crashed out in October, and after traveling yet again in November I was ready to hide from life for a year.
I’ve been off work since the 24th trying to recover mentally and physically, and I’m a bit frustrated because I don’t really feel like I’ve put a dent in the exhaustion. So I honestly wasn’t too surprised to find that I was in my pajamas by 7 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and in bed a bit after 10.
But beyond that, I’ve been trying to think about why the holiday just didn’t really mean anything to me this year. I’ve determined it’s a few things:
- I’m tired, as I mentioned.
- This past year was really hard on a collective level, and the insanity seems to be continuing unabated into 2026.
- I’ve realized that every day is about the same, at a macro level anyway.
Have you ever thought about how it is humans who have invented the constructs of days, weeks, months, years? In that way, it is only humans who perceive “time” because we are the only ones who track it and either celebrate it or bemoan it. Otherwise, the rest of planet Earth experiences cycles. Day, night, seasons, jet streams, tides. There are no birthdays. No months. No clocks. And by that token, there is no sense of aging either. Everything just is (in a cyclical sort of way).
Could it be that, at least during this particular chapter of my life, I’m falling more in line with the rest of the plants and animals on the planet?
It could also be more simple. It could be that my dad is still very sick, and how the story ends is still unknown, but what is known is that this year is starting out just like the last one although my physical location is different. So maybe that’s why I didn’t feel like celebrating the “new beginning” that humans say is January 1, 2026.
I don’t know. I’ve got two more days off of work to ponder it. Or maybe not. It’s probably a waste of “time.” 🙂