December 31

A Reflection

By Ellen Wang

Perhaps what makes the cathartic close of this year so especially reflective is the so-called end of this decade and the transition into the third decade of the third millennium. Perhaps you’ve looked back on this year, or even the last 10 years, and wondered in awe about just how much has happened and just how much has changed.

At some point in your life, you’ve probably been asked a question about where you see yourself in 10 or some other number of years. The number seems unfathomable (heck, what am I going to eat for dinner tomorrow?), but you add 10 to your age and try to envision a plausible future nonetheless. And every time, in hindsight, you couldn’t have been more wrong. How foolish, almost naive, humans are, to think that they could have any idea of the unknown.

Change—though scary at times—is natural, of course, and should be embraced. The longest personality study of all time, Personality Stability From Age 14 to Age 77 Years, published in Psychology and Aging, suggests that your personality is completely transformed over the course of your life. One neuroscience paper, published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, links the Buddhist belief that our self is ever-changing to physical areas of the brain. People drift apart and form new connections and meaningful relationships as the stars and planets make their journeys across the night sky, succumbing to gravitational push and pull, forces and attractions no less tangible than romance and camaraderie.

It is necessary to reflect—on yourself, your relationships, others, the world, life—regularly, and the conclusion of a human time-measuring construct as grandiose as a decade is the perfect opportunity for such meditation. Don’t look back on the past for superficial or surface-level accomplishments: How have you grown emotionally? Within maintaining and enriching relationships? With your perception of self and life itself? How have your interests and values changed? How have you spent and prioritized your time and effort? What brings you the purest form of fulfillment, and what could you imagine doing for eternity? Why do you do the things you do? What’s stopping you from the things you aren’t?

Reflection does not always look like sitting in a vintage armchair facing a ceiling-length window that overlooks a garden, tapping a pen on a leather-bound notebook. Nor does it have to be done through an elaborate collection of photos shot on film of everyday objects that symbolize every aspect of your identity. It absolutely can be, but mindful contemplation is not an activity reserved for the educated elite who make it their primary occupation to philosophize about “theory” and “the state of existence” and such.

Moving into 2020, a double-mirrored number (because yes, we all like certain numbers more than others), one too must hold a metaphorical mirror upon the literal mirror.

Perhaps you realized you’re much more confident in your abilities, whatever they may be in comparison to years or months or days ago. Or you made peace with someone—forgiving but not forgetting, moving forward but keeping them accountable as you do for yourself, for the past. Perhaps you miss that friend you used to laugh over the most questionable things with, who moved away and you no longer hear from, and perhaps you resolve on dropping a message checking up on how they’ve been. Perhaps you’ve waited so long for the right moment, not realizing that nothing will ever be perfect and this ‘right’ time will never come, and it is up to you break from the passive mode of living you’ve been chained to for the sake of conformity, validation, love, money, comfort—perhaps it is time, because it always has been, to plant your own seeds and throw those lemons back at life.