Anyone who goes to a gym regularly knows the whole “new year, new you” thing is a myth.
By the third week in January, half the new members lining up for the elliptical machines on New Year’s Day have vanished. Still more surrender by April. By November, almost everyone has thrown in the towel, vowing to start fresh in the new year.
But that’s the thing about a new year. It comes with a feeling of hope. It’s a like a free side.
Okay, let me see here, what looks good. Ooh, hope! Is that any extra with the new year entrée?
No. Hope comes with it, sir.
There’s no rational reason to believe that Jan. 1 will be any different than Dec. 31. Yet, we do. It’s in our DNA. Experts in human behavior say our need to peg spells of hope and fear on periods of time like a calendar year is rooted to our attachment to routine.
In November, we eat too much. By December, we’re sluggish. Come January, we commit to becoming the person we were meant to be. We seem to never stop believing in ourselves.
There has been much talk of 2020 being a “lost year.” We lost family and friends to disease. We lost jobs. Kids lost time in school and on playing fields and stages.
Everyone is mourning something.
But we also gained something from all those losses: perspective.
The pandemic brought tectonic change to almost every facet of life — how we live, how we work, what we value, what it means to be a kid and a parent and a partner, and what’s important.
Combine that with our primal desire to hope, and humanity is poised for an awakening in 2021.
Over the course of the pandemic, many of us have gotten to know our public spaces and families better than ever before. January’s CITY features Quajay Donnell’s paean to Rochester’s public art and Daniel Kushner’s piece about the promise of board games to bring people closer.
With so many people working from home, many of us have enjoyed cleaner air and taken more notice of nature. If that’s you, you’ll love Rebecca Rafferty’s homage to winter through the lens of writers and artists.
The arrival of a vaccine means the light at the end of the long tunnel we’ve been slogging through since last March has never been brighter.
But even in our rush to reach the end, we’ve learned to slow down. That’s a good thing, too, because we couldn’t keep up the pace we were going.
Now we have a president to complement our more deliberate and measured approach to life. Whatever faults he has, he won’t be as erratic and exhausting as the one we’ve just endured.
Nobody knows what 2021 will bring. Will our festivals return? Will we see movies in the theater again? Will we stand shoulder to shoulder in a barroom listening to live music, or sit elbow to elbow taking in a play? When the Buffalo Bills win the Super Bowl, will there be anyone in the stadium to cheer them on? See what I did there?
Nobody knows. But we hope.
Many blessing to you and yours in the new year.
David Andreatta is CITY’s editor. He can be reached at dandreatta@rochester-citynews.com.
This article appears in Jan 1-31, 2021.
