For a better year

Perspective is focus

For a long time, I have abandoned the idea of New Year resolutions as they box you into a corner of aspirations that never meet expectations and you are on a downer after that, beating yourself up about the seemingly unattainable pretending to the easily achievable with a large deficit of unnecessary angst and regret.

As I have 10 days from my birthday to the end of the year, I do at times contemplate a few things; an assessment of the year past, much gratitude for how the year has gone and a few thoughts for what I want to do in the year coming.

Emotions cloud space

Recently, there has been too much emotional traffic in that slip of the year, birthday into Christmas, into anniversary, into New Year and all it entails, I have hardly had the quietness of time, mind and space to do anything, I have been on a roll that to attach any significance to any day might well be counterproductive, because you start reckoning and find there is nothing in the reckoner.

There is a process of acculturation that is going on in two hearts, a kind of understanding that a clash of two cultures brings with it considerable baggage weighing down on immediate plans, the lodestar, and the centre of it all is the commitment we have to each other that we are learning to grow in more considered and enduring ways, this is a long-haul business.

Pandemic changed world

What is quite evident from the way the pandemic has strangled opportunity and accessibility is the failure of global leadership to arrest its hold. If only the world had Barack Obama, Angela Merkel and Gordon Brown for this pandemic as we did for the global financial crisis, rather than Donald Trump and Boris Johnson in the United States of America and the United Kingdom, I believe we would have had a better grip of the pandemic and less impact on our lives.

We are where we are now, we need to make the kind of choices that help through the situation so we can eventually take advantage of the circumstances. In my view, the world of work has changed so considerably, remote working is part of the deal and the ability to shift the home to any place on the globe is very much on the cards. In the world of talent and expertise, try as politicians and employers may, the national boundaries and domains would have to diminish in favour of the virtual world. This might even feed into the much-vaunted metaverse construct.

To the better

It is what I hope to exploit better and fully for the next stage of my career which is closely linked to crucial domestic arrangements and other things that would emerge from it. I find I have not done enough of a lot of things that I need to do more of; reading, listening, learning, travelling, exercising even loving, it has been crazy, and I have just pulled through by sheer grace, grit, grunt, grasp – anything that has given me a hold.

What is always a work in progress is the quest for a better me, that never stops and looking at the year ahead, there might just be things that change for that to happen. I cannot seem to switch my mind out of countdown, I guess that is how time works; at one point you think you have a lot of it and then, you have little left. Without promise but holding on to faith, hope, and love, 2022 will be better. I can work with that.