A New Year

It's a new year, and has been for two weeks now. 2009 seemed to slip away rather quietly; somehow overlooked and overshadowed by an Ironman finish and a college graduation and a paradise-like Christmas vacation with my family [and it’s cutest new member]. It was a great year by all accounts, but it is over now. Everything that could happen in 2009 already has, and a fresh, blank year has come to take its place. For reasons I can’t clearly explain, a new year intimidates me. It always has. But I guess it's just a natural progression; nothing more than one month ending and another beginning. People gather in certain places to kiss and celebrate and watch the clock and ring in a new year, but nothing really changes except a number on a calendar. It's still cold in Texas, and football is still being played on Sundays. I still wake up and am a waiter at Chili's and people still hate and kill each other for reasons I'll never understand. Maybe I was expecting 2010 to be clean break from 2009, for everything and everyone to be different and changing along with the new year. But Stephanie Meyer is still considered an author, CVS already has their Easter candy out for sale, the army of obese keep making pilgrimages to a couch instead of a gym, and eventually it becomes comfortable to say it's 2010, and then people will start looking forward to 2011. The new year becomes just like the old one.

That's exactly what scares me about a new year. The very real possibility of it blending with the old one and one day waking up and looking back and not seeing much change, just a prolonged existence defined by the pursuit of a paycheck. It fucking terrifies me, this acceptance [and almost encouragement] of a mediocre life; this constant compromising with yourself and your goals for years and years until they cease to become goals anymore and they turn into wishes. What a miserable way to exist [because it certainly can’t be called living]; where the years change but you don't. Where you get better at postponing life than living it, and the passing years add little more than a candle on your birthday cake.

And while I thoroughly enjoyed 2009, I want something different for my 2010. I want it to be filled with rides across America, hours in front of a blank page [and hopefully not-so-blank ones after a while], and as many hours lost in the pages of an O'Brian or a Steinbeck, or even some Plath if I feel brave enough. I want to break the tape in a time faster than I thought possible, and to make decisions most people my age aren't capable of making. So I enter this year with high hopes, as I suspect most people do, but also with a confidence that I will find a way to make 2010 a worthwhile and distinct journey rather than merely a mindless continuation of the past year.

Now I find myself staring a new year as well as "the real world" in the face [after having spent the last twenty-two years learning how to get ready for it], armed with the knowledge that whether I am an author, waiter, traveler, banker, lawyer, triathlete, student, or any combination of those, it is completely my decision. I can grow, I can train and write and sleep on my own schedule, at my own pace. I can be down and out in Austin or on the road in Kansas. There’s something liberating in that, though not necessarily comforting. 2010 can be anything of my choosing; a foundation for great achievements, a time for exploration and failure, resilience and patience. It can be full of regret or smiles. It can be progress or regress. I don’t know where I’ll be December 31st, 2010, or what I’ll have accomplished by then. I can’t even guarantee I’ll be alive. I just know that 2010 must be filled with something more than just the inevitable birthdays and holidays and weekends, which happen regardless of whether I wake up or not. It must be 2010, not an extended 2009 or the preamble to 2011. It must be 2010, nothing more, nothing less.