Christmas break at home from college is a nice academic pause from the classes and notes of the past semester and everyone you see from high school or from around town is growing up at the same speed you are things have changed. Things change, but sometimes not quite enough. The same situations from senior year are your surroundings once more, and the people who you lived next to have changed just as much as you have. Drama resurfaces, much to your dismay, and those you escaped from at graduation show up at your local supermarket. The same moments you had in high school are taken from a new view through the eyes that have seen more. We've changed from then and we continue to do so.
I was challenged recently by my hometown youth pastor to write a short list of single words that describe who I was in 2016. I churned out SAT worthy adjectives on the surface level of this assignment and put my work on the page. I shared with my small group of old high school friends and known faces and I refused to dwell on the truth and lack thereof that I had put on the page. I listed words to fit what I was told I was: growing, stressed, maturing. I listed the words society describes as vulnerable and deep: lost, anxious, scared. I even managed to put some if the buzz words to go alongside my optimistic persona: determined, enlightened, accomplished. As I thought about what he asked us to write and how he phrased it, "What you were in 2016", I realized that while I am all of those things, they aren't me. They give little single documents in the file folder shut closed on 2016.
According to the calendar, that drawer was shut and locked at the strike of 12 on December 31, but besides fatigue and probably nausea, what about us is actually any different when we awake the next morning in the new year? 2016 you has not left as much as you want to think so. There's no switch we flipped or upgrade we made as we slept; we're the same person, just a few hours older and slightly more motivated to change whatever we feel was wrong with us in years past. There's no distinction of an ending of those words I thought described the year; instead, we want them to change through our actions over the next year and beyond. I never want to look back at the year behind me and think the best of my days is gone. I want my best years to forever be ahead of me, always looking up and b
etter than before, always making the effort to be better. So that's what I'm using to describe my 2016, and 2017 and from now on. That's what I am and have been and will be.
Improving.
I'm a fine wine getting better with age. I strive to be the person spouting stories of a life well lived on my death bed and knowing the best is even yet to come because the
road is always uphill. This highway of life is curling up the mountain slowly but surely. So 2016 wasn't great; I think that's a general consensus. But frankly, I improved. I improved from who I was in 2015 and hopefully over the next 12 months, I improve from that as well. Well, at least I'm working on it.
So cheers to 2017, let's do some improving.
