Are you ready to slam the door on 2024?
Part of moving into a New Year can involve looking back at the year that is drawing to a close. If the year that is ending has been “bad,” this practice can feel like slamming the door with relief as an unwelcome guest finally makes their exit. On the flip side, if the year has been “good,” looking back can feel like a grateful counting of blessings.
As my sister, father and I gathered to ring in 2025, I will be honest that I expected the three of us to haul off and slam a metaphorical door on 2024 with desperate relief. Supporting one another through my mom’s dementia’s endgame was absolutely the headline of the year and it was physically grueling, mentally draining, and emotionally gutting – essentially, a whole lot of “unfun.”
Don’t be so hasty!
Yet as I readied my home and my pantry for the New Year’s Eve family pajama party and game night that we’d planned, I was surprised to find my reflections going in an entirely other direction. You see, while the awfulness of 2024 dominates my memory of the year, when I look back over the rest of the year, a whole lot of really wonderful stuff happened in my life. The more I ponder 2024, the more blessings I find to count.
Even more surprising – and inspiring – is the sheer quantity of blessings that flowed from the awfulness itself. These blessings range from the incidental to the profound:
- My discovery on dozens of drives to Central New Jersey to be with my parents that if I ask Spotify to play Eddie Vedder’s rendition of “Save It for Later” that the playlist the algorithm chooses for me after that song ends is excellent.
- The easy shorthand and intimacy my dad, my sister and I developed as we worked together to navigate the nonsensical and barrier-filled world that is our medical system’s response to dementia patients.
- My return to attending in-person yoga classes and the gratitude and relief I felt for not having to be in charge for an hour as a teacher guided the class through a practice.
- The deep healing that I experienced of my at-times fraught relationship with my mother over the last weeks of her life.
I’ll stop there, but assure you there are many, many more blessings that I would not have received were it not for the awfulness.
Our perspective is almost always limited
To simply slam the door on 2024 would not honor the whole of my experience of the year. Were I to do that, I would be operating from a mindset bogged down in avidya, which, according to Patanjali in the Yoga Sutras, is one of the fundamental causes of distress for us human beings (See Yoga Sutras 2.3 – 2.5). Avidya, according to translator and teacher Alan Finger, is when we make the error of assuming our limited perspective of our life is all that is.
My initial assumption of what kind of year 2024 had been – that it was all awful because the headline was awful – is a mindset of avidya. I know this because, when I give myself the objectivity and spaciousness of reflection (which leads to vidya or clear seeing), I see more. I see wonderful gifts that had nothing at all to do with the awfulness, but that sustained me throughout the year. And I see what I called in a long ago essay ambiguous gifts – gifts that I treasure that have flowed my way from an experience I never in a million years would have chosen.
How could this realization affect a regular old day? Well, I’m assuming you, like me, have had days where one bad thing sours the way you feel about the whole day. Perhaps you had a fender bender on the way to the gym. Or maybe you stubbed your toe on the way into the bathroom to brush your teeth. Or maybe your partner snored all night long and you awakened irrationally angry. These are super worthy headlines of a “bad day.”
A little practice can distract you from the headlines of your day and allow you to enjoy the fine print
But, with a little self-awareness, they can become one event among the many that fill your day. And when you broaden the aperture through which you see your day, perhaps the one “bad” thing is balanced or even outweighed by all the good that happened as well. In my experience, this is often the case.
I am not advocating that you try not to feel the frustration of the fender bender, or the pain of the sore toe, or the irritation that you feel for having a miserable night’s sleep while your partner slept blissfully (and loudly) through the night. By all means, feel all the feels! And then allow yourself to stay open to feel all the feels of whatever comes your way next. Or at the very least, if you cannot escape the echoes of those feels, take a moment as you climb into bed to comb back through the day seeking little bright spots. They’re always there.
Think of this as a practice that can help steal some of the limelight away from the “headlines” of your experiences during this new year so that you are better able to soak in the fine print of your days. Happy New Year!