Happy New Year! We made it …the calendar actually flipped from 2020 to 2021 now let’s see how long it takes my brain to understand that it is 2021. My mom is cooking up s storm, here in the south there are very strong traditions that surround new years that dictate what we can eat, the things we can do, and of course the things that we can’t do. Such a laundry, if you do laundry apparently you are washing away the good fortune of the new year. Every year I get a lecture from mom on NYE that if I have anything that needs to be washed I need to get to it as I can’t the next day. Like clockwork. It’s the one day a year that no laundry is done in her house.
I have my own New Years traditions. Every year on Jan 1st one of the things I do is clear off my cell phone. Go through aps and uninstall them if I haven’t used them lately. I also take all my photos off the phone from the previous year basically wipe it clean and start fresh. That’s one way of organizing my pictures, if they were in 2020 I took them on my camera roll ….. it also allows me to start fresh. All that stays on are the aps I use and my contact information. It feels like a refresh, even if I spend part of the first week redownloading pictures for lock screens and memes I want to send by no longer have.
I also go through my social media and drop those who need to be dropped. I’ve been a little funny with my social media the last few years. I’ve decided most of my lack of enjoyment in said social media is the people I interact with. I am slowly learning to let negativity go and move on with positivity and light and people who generally make me laugh, engage in conversation, or are just interesting to talk to even if it’s only every once in a while that they hit my radar. I have found that all that negative BS, sharing, RTing does is block the positive and meaningful conversations from even have a chance to rise to the top and so there fore those people have to go. Sometimes it’s athletes from my alma matter who graduate and move on with life and no longer “do” social media as they have entered the real world and are no longer pushing their sport. A lot of time it’s fly by night fans of said alma mater who are far too critical of 18-24 year olds and I can’t support what they are saying. Usually it’s celebs that I followed after watching something they did and really wanting to learn more about said person, or musicians who entered my realm only to not really land on my ear holes so they have to go ….. long tern vs short term in full effect here.
I keep thinking about 2020. We got a call last night randomly out of the blue by an old family friend who wanted to tell us hello. She said she thinks of us often but rarely picks up the phone to call. Last night she felt the need to call. Now she genuinely had a lot of problems this year, her Son in Law died (he had a massive heart attack and died in his wife’s arms), her daughter is going through another round of cancer and it’s apparently really bad. She’s 80 and has recently moved into a new house to be closer to the daughter who just lost her husband. However most of the call talked about how really horrific 2020 was for the world as a whole, you know the cliché stuff you see online. Like people believed that on midnight Dec. 31st everything was going to magically get better all because the clock turned to Jan 1, 2021. Yes for most it sucked hard, for many it was a really rough year but I keep thinking that there has to be more to 2020 than just unending misery.
I keep thinking about the people who had a GREAT 2020 but can’t really talk about it cause of the overall belief of the collective is that it was awful for everyone, to think otherwise must feel like being out of touch with the rest of society. However I have to believe that there are people who fell in love, who had children, who got married, who took trips (when allowed), who graduated, who got their dream jobs. Those people likely look back on the year 2020 in a fond way, at least in private.
I guess my point is that a lot of what we do is shaped by the collective belief of others, the media, our social media feeds. AKA if someone is having a bad day you will have a bad day. If someone constantly talks about negativity then negativity will creep into your thought patterns making it hard to find the positive, the good, the … happy. So that’s my goal for 2021 to not let the views of the outside affect my thoughts and views as much.
So here’s to a great 2021 for us all …. Let’s focus on the good, give positivity a chance and connect with each other in a greater way. 2020 proved that when we collectively come together we are all better for it.
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