A new year is upon us and it’s a great time to reflect on all the questionable choices you made in 2016 and to start really focusing on yourself. It’s time to eat fewer chips and do more sit-ups and you’re really going to spend less time on Facebook this year. If you think about it, any day is a perfect time to start a New Year’s resolution, make a change and you have 365.24 days to work on it, but I digress.
Someone much smarter than me could probably tell you why humans choose the first of the year to reassess their current standing. Maybe it’s an evolutionary drive for constant self-improvement prompted by the sense of a clean slate, perhaps it’s a tendency of human behavior to delay facing our inadequacies until given a hard deadline, or maybe it’s just all marketing.
I, for one, always look forward to the new year, the alternative is not so great. A wide open road ahead, full of possibilities and adventures waiting to be had if you make the right turns and have a little luck. This year, however, I feel a weight looming over me and the road looks windy and foreboding. I feel hate, intolerance, and ignorance have been given a stronger voice this year. An embodiment of repulsiveness and bigotry has been given the keys. I fear for my kids future. Focusing on pixels and semicolons doesn’t seem that important when I am standing at a precipice of uncertainty. So what do I do? What can I do?
My resolve is to try and be an agent for positive changes. I’ll try to use my privilege and resources to make a positive impact any way I can. I may not be able to contribute that much at the macro-level, but I sure as hell can at the micro-level. This is what helps me lift the weight, this is the example I want to set for my kids, this feels like the road I want to be on.