The new year! The new decade! Moments like these are always an opportunity to take a step back, to count your joys, to look at what’s not going well, and to decide what to do about it.
Let me preempt your argument about whether the decade starts on Jan 1 2020 or 2021 by telling you I’ve arbitrarily decided the first decade runs from 1 BC to 9 AD, because I want to reconcile the endpoints of decades with being able to say the 80’s, the 90’s, the 20’s. But I’ll take it a step further. Why should these fresh-start moments come around only once a year? They can come on your birthday or an anniversary. On the start of the school year, or a new job. Or to celebrate finally cleaning off your desk. Or to mark an otherwise boring Wednesday in the dead of winter.
We control the frame of reference. We decide when it’s time to mark the scorecard, turn the page, step up to the next tee, or whatever wipe-the-slate-clean metaphor helps convince ourselves that we are the ones in charge here.
Whatever frame of reference you choose, I wish you a joyous start.
