Excelsior into 2021

After I read Sarah Miller’s compelling New Yorker column “Cancel New Year’s Eve Forever,” not only did I agree, but I got to thinking about why people make such a big deal about the so-called new beginning the replacement calendar brings.

First of all, how many beginnings do each of us get? If the beginning involves a new craft, a new skill, a new project, a new way to improve our lives and the lives of others, then the answer is “an infinite number.” Because each of us should be ticking off items from a bottomless bucket list every day of our short and precious lives. The world is too big — the universe is too vastly big — for any of us to box ourselves in and limit our literal and figurative diets to corn flakes and fast-food cheeseburgers. Do you want fries with that?

Even while we struggle with stay-at-homes as the legacy of COVID-19 lingers into 2021 (remember, the “19” part means 2019!), we can use the same dreaded technology that reimagined staff meetings as video games to explore the Earth, the solar system, the universe, our minds and imaginations, our souls and The Big Why.

But if the so-called new beginning is more a case of hitting some imaginary Reset button, then is it really a beginning? Is it really new?

Every video game since Pac-Man has allowed players — especially those who lost and saw their avatar dissolve while some synthesized trombone played a whomp-whomp lament — to hit reset and start again on the same quest.

IRL, some situations do allow for a reset. Far more do not. Video games have warped a lot of perceptions. 

In most real-life situations, we are challenged to press on, adjust, learn from mistakes and successes, but not loop back and cover the same territory again. The new territory may be familiar, with similar potholes and roadblocks, but it’s never identical, because life and timelines go forward. 

Near the end of the movie “Big,” after the Tom Hanks character has asked Zoltar to make him a kid again, he asks the Elizabeth Perkins character to come back with him. She declines, saying she has no desire to go through those years again. 

Remember: Despite his adult body as played by Hanks, Josh Baskin is still 13, and has not yet gone through those years. He’s not looping back; he has only forward to go. 

As I do. As we do.

Sometime tomorrow, I’ll toss out the wall calendars from 2020 and hang new ones that point forward through the next 12 months, the next 365 days. I’ll add this year’s memories to my skill set, to my bucket list, to my personal naughty or nice lists. 

And throughout 2021, my face will be toward the sun, away from the shadows of last year and all of my 65 years, because I won’t — I can’t — go through those years again. There are too many actual “new beginnings” awaiting me. 

Awaiting us.