New Year’s Eve is, if anything, a time of self reflection on where we were the year prior.

One New Year’s Eve you may be discovering how deep a new found love goes and next you may be mourning the loss of a love that has gone a stray.

Being technically homeless for much of the last three years has taught me a lot about time and reflection.
It was four years ago on the last night of the year where I felt so alone that it felt like a literal hunger in my belly and I ended up starting to cry and could not stop which scared me a great deal and I ended up in a long text conversation with a crisis line.

Three years ago I was as sourly noted above licking my wounds from both the shortest and intense love affair I’ve ever experienced and that someone is still in my life and heart to this very day but that was the night for me where I knew what we had briefly was gone via distance, circumstance, and one comprehension error on my part.

Two years ago I was in Tennessee, trying to scramble a way back ‘home’ in Illinois despite how comfortable I was in the physical place I was in, despite knowing that a good friend had misled me and would come to find that went even further than I thought.

A year ago I was in the same holding pattern as it were as the government takes a million years to let me know if the things that make me unable to work make me unable to work…

But I’m not upset at the passage of time, only what time I waste as it passes.

I’m not angry (99.9% of the time anyway) that those things occurred, many of them shaped good things, necessary things, things that were used for survival and things that were needed to feel like I was at least a little bit alive.

But they all had one thing in common and that is that things changed, time sped forward, life moved on, I was not where I was and neither were the pieces around me even if the situation remained mostly the same.

So that’s the challenge I send out to you as 2023 comes to a close…recall the last four or five years, where you were and where you are, the good and the bad.

And even if it seems like you had a lot more losses then wins know you still moved and even if one crisis begot another know you still were solving the problems, you were still being as proactive as you could in your situation.

The purpose of time and dates is at least partially to denote changes as you move forward, a measuring stick to see that no matter how much we may take on and how much may go wrong or right it always moves on…in time.

I wonder where we will all be next year?