The New Year
Welcome one and all to the new year! Welcome to the next greatest year of our lives yadda yadda yadda...
Fuck that.
If anything that's quite possibly the worst way to go about your year. Thinking that this year will be the best in your life is not the right way to go about things ever.
Now, why would I be saying this? Things certainly get better with age, don't they? More experience means more "street cred" and therefore an easier life because you've been tested by time.
Trees would be a perfect analogy to counter this idea because they can live as long as people. The only difference would be that trees are better than people because while people grow and then shrink, trees just grow. It would be the same as saying that a sickly, old tree is going to give better fruit than a healthier, younger tree.
Getting older has its benefits, yes, but eventually things go wrong. Lowered immune system function, lowered bodily locomotion, lowered internal organ function, deteriorating eyesight and hearing and that's not mentioning the millions of maladies that can befall each and every one of us mortal humans on this world.
That is not to say that everything is bad, however, it's just that the human body wasn't really made to live longer than 40 years.
Either way, many of the people in this world aren't 40 or above, then why am I telling you this? I tell you this because most don't understand that for many others the next year means worsening conditions for them.
We become so wrapped up in our own lives, in our own worlds, that we forget the suffering of countless others in this world. We forget that for many, seeing the light of tomorrow is the next adventure let alone seeing the next year.
The world and life are not a constant. They are not things that shall last forever. They are two of the most precious things we have if not the most precious. We must strive to make both great, if not for future generations, then for ourselves and our fellow humans. (If you aren't human and you're reading this, I beseech you to teach some sense to us all)
I've seen countless people that were partying or celebrating the old year on New Year's Eve and they admitted that had done "nothing in the year".
To those who can classify into this group, I would say to you only two words, I'll let you guess which two I would use.
You have done so much in a single year. When I hear things like this I become extremely irritated, enough to emotionally blackmail. Think of all the people that didn't get to see the entire year, you probably did a whole lot more than most of the population of Earth, past, and present, because quite frankly you've had to have done more than a dead person.
In all honesty, I was going to write this in the spirit of change, so I'll go with that then.
The way that we change this is to change ourselves. Each one of us has done something. Whether it was to cure some disease or the act of breathing, you've done something to change the world.
While often people think of me as an optimist, and while others think of me as a pessimist who thinks that this world will end tomorrow, I like to think of myself as a realist. For better or for worse you might not agree and you might be right, but I do think that realists have the best lives, mostly because they don't need a reality check.
Well from the viewpoint of a realist, I would have to say that each and every person on this world has made a difference, no matter how small, and while they may not know it, they need to understand that they have made a difference, to someone, somewhere, they have made a difference. This could have been a bad difference, mind you, but a difference none the less.
Next Year probably won't be the best year of your life. It may as well be the worst in your life, but know that you've made a difference. And the next step would be to see if you liked the difference that you made and if you can make better differences in the future. No person gives a flying fuck as to whether or not getting thin was your New Year's resolution. Make a resolution based on what you want to improve in your life; make a resolution based on how you want to impact the world.
Whether or not you've made a significant difference to the world you have impacted it. Whether it was by changing the future of medicine or you've just used some oxygen, you made a difference. Without the change in medicine we would not live as long as we do today, and without the use of oxygen of the average Joe or Jill, we wouldn't have a use for plants and trees now, would we?