Category: optimism

Winding Down 2023

Hi.

I used to do this thing where I spent the month of December winding down the year, writing little bits each day, using a particular dram of whisky as a prompt.

If you missed those, or would like to revisit them, you can find links at the bottom of this post.

I won’t be doing exactly that this year, but I will be writing some stuff, possibly each day, through the end of the year. Will whisky find its way into my musings? Come back tomorrow to find out.

<dramatic pause?>

This is the first new post here in two years.

I wasn’t going to mention that — you can read the dates on my latest posts just as well as I can — but I figured I should, since I usually do. And yes, I rather dislike having to acknowledge that this has happened often enough that I can use the phrase “I usually do.”

Ugh.

I’m not going to dwell on it. As usual, stuff happened, mostly within the walls of my head, that kept me away awhile. 

Not to worry. Life is good, and I feel like writing a bit. See you tomorrow.

Note: Within each category below the posts are sorted newest first, so if you want to read them in order, you’ll need to do some scrolling. Sorry. It occurs to me now that it would have been a good idea to include forward/backward links in each post to ease the reading experience, but I didn’t think of that at the time. Maybe I’ll go back and add some, but if you’re reading this I haven’t yet.

Whisky Wind-down 2016

Whisky Wind-down 2017

Whisky Wind-down 2019

Let’s Gallup

So, by Chinese reckoning, we are about to mark the beginning of a new year.

I don’t know much about Chinese New Year, except that the festivities last about two weeks, a fact of which I highly approve. I am, in general, greatly in favor of extended holiday celebrations, an area in which the United States lags woefully behind the rest of the world.

Here, it takes a weekend conjunction to manage more than one day off for holiday festivities, and that’s just sad. We need these breaks for mind, heart, and soul, and, yet, for all too many working Americans, a holiday break is just a day off and then back to the grind, unless you work in a service industry, in which case holidays are just grind, grind, grind, same as every other day of the year.

Sorry. I hadn’t intended to get grumpy there. I was, in fact, meaning to remark upon new beginnings.

I don’t know whether it is traditional in the East, but I think this is a fine time for reflection, new direction, even, if you can bear the burden, resolution.

Although I have groused about the Western New Year’s Day tradition of resolutions, I am very much in favor of reflection and goal adjustment.

Whether that reflection/adjustment comes at an officially recognized occasion, such as marking the rollover of the local calendar, a personal mark such a birthday or anniversary, or just, “this Thursday,” I appreciate the process.

I have, in fact, been engaged in such a process myself lately, and you are seeing some of the results in the form of new content in this once-dusty space. Granted, snow days played a part there, but that was just fortuitously coincidental. This space, as you will see, is not all dead, but, in fact, only mostly dead, which, as you probably know, is slightly alive.

See you tomorrow.