I’m not as angry as I was last year as I wrote my post welcoming 2018. It’s not that there is less to be angry about, if anything, there is more. It’s sheer exhaustion. If 2017 exhausted my supply of spoons, then 2018 exhausted my supply of knives.
Which is not to say I’m not still fighting for what I know to be right, but one can only tilt at windmills for so long and I prefer to save my sword for the knights I can defeat.
A new year is such an arbitrary thing. Nothing changes but a number on a calendar, but humanity likes to place a false importance on the changing of a date. We make goals, we fail in those goals, we make the same goals the next year.
I don’t like resolutions. I do like promises, especially of the sort that I can keep.
So.
I promise to make mistakes.
I promise to try new things. I also promise to fail at these new things, but maybe, sometimes, as Beckett says, sometimes I may “fail better.”
I promise to make art. Good, bad, and middling.
I promise to read new books and support new authors, especially diverse ones.
I promise to survive.
Happy New Year. Keep hope alive. Keep surviving.