It's Been A Year

It's Christmastime once again and the New Year will soon be upon us as an arbitrary marker of the passage of time, commemorating the beginning of another calendar year. This is the time of year when photo collages of the past year begin showing up in social media, lists are made, and new resolutions for self-improvement are dreamed up, all within the context of reflecting on the past, ushering the "new" and doing away with the "old."

The latest Facebook gimmick is the "It's Been a Great Year!" photo collage where the social media giant selectively pulls photos from a person's timeline and weaves together a story of said person's year. This is not a bad thing and it is, in fact, fun to go back and reminisce over everything that has happened in the past calendar year. However, I find it to be a bit overly-simplistic, and unrepresentative of the complexity of life. In fact, I even get uncomfortable with the title, "It's Been a Great Year!" because it implies that my year was, "of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above the normal or average," according to the dictionary definition of the word, "great."

For those of us not celebrating amazing milestones, or who perhaps had difficulties in the past twelve months, perhaps this use of hyperbole is uncomfortable and even inappropriate. Maybe it's enough to say, "hey, that happened!" or "it's been another year!" and maybe that's okay. I feel like we are so often concerned with telling everyone how "great" or "fantastic" our lives are, that we gloss over what makes each of us human. We all experience joy/suffering, happiness/sadness, triumph/defeat in our lives. It's not always an equal balance, and sometimes the bad outweighs the good, but it's all there in between the photos that we share with the rest of the world.

As I get older and as I try to understand my own interpersonal relationships, I am beginning to see that my constant stream of photos, tweets, and status updates dedicated to enshrining the good in my life, actually distances me from other people. I get to tell my story to a group of friends but I can omit the bad stuff and I become a one dimensional character. This is what leads to depression, anxiety, and addiction. Human beings need fellowship and community that is based on everything that comes with our humanity, both bad and good. We are attracted to one another because of the good things, but it's the difficulties that bind us together and give depth to our shared experience.

As I look back over the past twelve months, I am grateful to have lived it. I am grateful for good friends and family, for self-awareness, for everything that I have that I do not deserve, for the ability to live my life one day at a time, and for the grace of God that I get to keep on going. It's been a year.