I love new years. No, not the holiday, though New Year’s Eve is one of my favorite nights for getting wrecked, and New Year’s Day is my favorite morning for trying to solve the mystery of whether I did anything really stupid the night before. I actually mean freshly begun years, years that haven’t had their potential explored yet.

I love taking stock of the year past and applying what I learned to set some way points to guide my way through the rest of the year. I’m not so much into making resolutions, which so often are mostly about denying yourself things that are bad for you or trying to to force yourself to do things you don’t really want to do. Life can be miserable enough without making a vow to make myself more miserable. Knowing clearly what I want, though, always helps me make better decisions throughout the year.  That’s not to say I always make the best decisions, but it’s easier to lean into choices that take you where you want to go if you know where that is.

In 2017, my life was shaken up in a lot of ways. There were a lot of changes and some surprises. Even the good surprises changes the landscape of my life enough that for much of the latter half of the year I wasn’t sure where I was going anymore. I hadn’t planned to stay in New York past the end of 2017, but here I am still here in 2018, no longer having a plan to leave. So it’s time for either a new plan to leave, or a plan to stay. Probably the latter, though I’m holding off committing to that until I make my trip back to Atlanta this month.

I hope 2018 brings good fortune all around for those who aren’t working towards doing harm to others and those that are working towards harming others suffer all the misfortune left over. There was a lot of tearing down in 2017. I hope 2018 is the year we remember how to build better things.