A New Year’s Wish for the Wanderer

Originally published January 1, 2016
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Every evening the sun sets, then rises again a few hours later.

Yet something feels different about this particular sunset and sunrise. Oh, that’s right … it only happens once a year.

Yep. It’s time to stop writing the old year’s name whenever you fill out the date for something. For the next 365 days, the world has a new number.

If you wander out and about today, you may receive wishes of happiness from your barista or whoever else you encounter. You may notice that the gym is especially full. A new crop of well-meaning people with good-intentioned “resolutions” is off to the races.

In your online conversations, people are using phrases like “new year, new you” and you’re like … okay. How does this new year somehow make a “new me”?

And yet, it is a New Year, after all. Something does feel different. So why not use this time as a catalyst for the new direction you seek?

Because if you’re anything like me, wanderer, you know that something will be different about this year, and it’s not just that it has a different number in its name.

Maybe you’re on the cusp of a big change. There’s a stage of transition coming up on the horizon, with an end point that isn’t as precisely clear as you might like. But make no mistake, wanderer: there is definitely an end point. You know there’s something waiting on the other side.

You’ll take what you’ve learned from the last year. You’ll take what you’ve experienced—all of it. The pain, the pleasure, the joy, the sorrow, and all of those WTF-was-that-about moments.

And as you reflect, you realize that you don’t even know what the lesson is for some of those things. Why did it have to be so hard? Couldn’t there have been an easier way? But you take the experiences nonetheless, because you know they’ll help you become your true self.

Yes, there is change ahead in this year, of that you are sure. All you have to do is find it.

But first you have to wait. And it’s true what they say: the waiting really is the hardest part.

You’re not even certain that you’ll fully understand what the change means before the moment passes you by. But the odds are ever in your favor, and like those well-meaning people in the gym today, you know that you’ll give it all you’ve got.

Happy New Year, wanderer.

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Image: Matthias