The Absurdity of Years

Reading through my 2023 In The Rearview essay, which covered a particularly rough patch for me personally, I was reminded, again, that years are a human construct that we agree on collectively enough to have installed them as the main storage apparatus for the passage of time we experience.

Our actual lived experience does not occur within these increments like so much sausage in a link.

Because the vast majority of us on earth who live in urban settings can no longer look up at the stars to measure our existence by the way it cartwheels through the universe with constellations as road markers, we are left with years, decades, life spans and centuries like old Roman roads and pagan rock walls.

All this to say, time as you experience it cannot be accurately contained in the 365 days between January 1 and December 31.

Popular culture has embraced this timeframe to the point that life almost starts over again on January 1. You get three new lives, a fresh start and everything is set back to zero.

I’m sure all of this can be attributed to some evolutionary advantage of collectivizing our output into seasons that tended to follow the earth’s trajectory around the sun and so years.

But when you measure your lived experiences within the 365 days from January 1 to December 31, you are discounting so many other variables that make up human existence.

I had this realization while journaling every day of 2024. This wasn’t a resolution, per se, it was an attempt to capture this year in terms I could deal with. What happened to me each and every day of this year that makes me the person I am today, right now?

Moleskin Journals

I’ve used Moleskin for journaling on and off my entire adult life. I have many but never two years in a row.

The Moleskin journal I bought for this happened to start page 1 on January 1, 2024, and so my lived experiences were constrained into these last 363 days and counting. But all the things I referenced across these many days, and it’s a lot more than you think, come from my far past to the recent past.  This thing will be a 365-page book of pretty much everything I did, felt and saw this year, but it’s also a reflection of the way I feel about the future and whether optimism and hope exist within the pages of the new Moleskin I’m about to dive into for 2025.

I wanted to start a personal journal, because working online and in social media has addled my memory for the specific events. I found myself looking back to my Instagram stories to figure out what I did on any given day.

In fact, I missed an entire week of journaling in late May, 2024, and to fill these pages in so I can say I journaled every day of 2024, I went back and looked through my Instagram stories to figure out what I did on those days and to document the weather, which has been a fun, little side project I did not expect to enjoy as much as I have.

Back to my main point, your life, even your journaled life, if you are so disciplined, or just crazy, does not exist within the 365-days-equal-one-year construct we humans devised. It’s a multifaceted existence that is careening through the universe at 1.3-Billion miles per hour. Your existence is constantly smashing headlong into the lived experiences of everyone else you encounter, and many you don’t, which means your lived experience isn’t isolated into the 356 days you’re about to begin in just over three days. Instead, it’s a constant reference to your far distant past, your recent past and every other existence your existence is bouncing off of or influenced by within this particular construct.

So, it’s unfair to look at January 1 as a restart of any kind. It’s merely another step, which gets its strengths, and failures, from every other step below it. And because we dream and are capable of planning and hoping, it’s also influenced greatly by what has not happened yet but which is already in motion thanks to the interactions you are having today and those you will have tomorrow, and so on.

This isn’t a proper 2024 Year In The Rearview but perhaps an answer to myself at the questions I always ask at the end of each year. And I publish this here mainly to remind myself that my experiences are not contained in years like a neatly wrapped gift. My experiences are a bubbling cauldron constantly being added to by the draughts of other lives and the eternal fire beneath it, lovingly tended by me.