The Reflection Pool
Now that we are collectively a few days into 2024 it seems a logical point in time for some reflection. I had refrained from writing a year-end review post. Such things tend to be rather cliche around the end of the year, but even with that understanding there’s nothing wrong with taking a pause to reflect our position in time and space. What has happened, and are we happy with the direction we are heading? Such reflections can be two pronged – specifically the reflection can be both specific to an individual and collectively as a group.
From a personal stand point I’m in acceptance mode, and I have been for a little while now. The domestic turbulence for the past several years has subsided, and now there is an open canvas in front of me. There’s a measure of uncertainty about that. Not a negative uncertainty, or a feeling of dread, but more of quandary. There’s a lot to do, but is there a logical order on how they need to be addressed? How do you rank them in order of priority? A couple of them were checked off in 2023, but for this year I’m sitting back with a hot cup of tea, scanning the decayed brownish landscape, and having little motivation to do most of them. It is why I refrain from doing such things as New Year’s Resolutions. They are large targets of failure. For example – virtually no one I would suspect starts their resolution on January 1st. New Year’s Day is a holiday, and human procrastinating nature automatically pushing to start dates to after a holiday. How many said they’d start their diet on January 2nd? How many more have caved on or before January 5th? No, resolutions are a fool’s task list. It is better as the Cortex podcast pontificates, to do themes, or if you prefer, establish trend lines. You have an idea for a goal, but are you trending in the right direction towards fulfilling it? Themes are personal, and what may make sense to one won’t for another. Mine is simply, Reflections. The year 2023 (Discovery) was still a bit of cleanup from everything that had transpired over the last five years. It was still an adjustment period with several large projects to manage on top of it all. It wasn’t until the waning months of ’23 that I finally got a sense of what a new normal actually meant. Each year builds off what has happened prior, and Reflections is a natural progression of Discovery in that context. In some aspect I feel almost an empty nester. It’s difficult to quantify.
There are things I’d like to accomplish of course. One of them is to write more, but I will not write for the sake of writing. I write when I have topical thoughts; not because I haven’t written in a while. That would just be blabbering. However, beyond the domestic trend there is a larger, more global or community trend. It is on those that I sometimes focus my attention. Or on sports, but I have tried to divide my posts between those two topics specifically so that they can be liken to two branches off the same tree. It is part of the consolidation I did several weeks ago, and it has been easier to maintain from a management perspective.
As for 2024 itself it is like peering into a reflection pool, and it is too soon to make any estimate of the depth of the water. Each year has its own unique currents, wave troughs and crests, and depths. Where we are going geo-politically, domestically, or as individuals is anyone’s guess. However, what I have come to learn is that by the time December comes around we’ll find the year wasn’t like anything we anticipated. Or we can make some good guesses, but how we arrive and the conclusions will not be anything like what we expect now. The pessimist in me says it’ll be a turbulent year. The practical side of me says it’ll be a turbulent year, but that’s not any different then the countless years that preceded it.