2018: A New Year

The beginning of a new year is always notable, turning another page on the calendar, but also marking a new beginning, since we measure our lives in years, the time it takes our planet, our own particular piece of the universe, to make its journey all the way around our sun, our own special star out of all the uncounted billions and billions of stars we think we know about. When I ponder existence on this scale, I'm always amazed by how much significance some of us are able to give to our own individual lives. We pass in little more than the blink of an eye, or not even that, and yet to us it's everything, all we have really. Such a marvelous mystery, and yet we give so little thought to the fact of our existence while we lavish our attention on trivialities.

But then why not? Who's to say what is trivial and what truly matters? Does anyone know? Of course, many are willing to tell us their views, but when you add up all the philosophies and religions we humans have come up with, how much of it can we really agree on? And that's just us, our single species. True, we've made a mark on the planet way out of proportion to our significance. We've destroyed countless millions of other life forms, both willfully and also unintentionally. By accident and by design we've made our planet barely habitable for ourselves and uninhabitable for millions of our fellow creatures. And yet most of this we've done with as little thought to the consequences as we give to the way we treat our own bodies or one another. It makes me wonder, if we current humans truly are by some circumstance the best creation can do, what does that say about existence? Perhaps that's why we don't like to think about things on such a scale.

In my own small world, however, life has been pretty good. J and I had a bit of a set back toward the end of last year with regards to our health, but we seem to have survived, although we were both under the weather with very bad cases of the flu for the better part of December, and that despite both getting the high dose flu shots, as we do every year. Our illness meant that we had an even quieter holiday than usual for us. We stayed in and watched a few of our favorite Christmas movies, some basketball and some football, but otherwise did little to mark the season. I managed a somewhat festive meal of marinated salmon for Christmas day, and to welcome in the new year, we had an improvised Mexican dinner washed down with a bit of Martini & Rossi asti spumante, which we prefer to the more traditional champagne. On New Year's Day we had a nice ham with sprouts and sweet potatoes and black-eyed peas.

Since then we've had a run of colder than normal weather, which has kept us, weather wimps that we are, indoors more than we might like, but we did manage to get out and celebrate my birthday with my brother and sister-in-law, and later with some of our friends in Lago. Otherwise it's been mostly reading and jigsaw puzzles while we await the first signs of spring.