End is nigh

the moment when the music turns off and club lights come on

As the year ends, speaking with work colleagues and friends, I have found myself proudly admitting that I’m a sucker for the new year. I find myself joyfully exclaiming how foolishly I fall for all the airy buoyant guff, the new leaves swiftly turning over, the doomed promises.

We have all told ourselves a million times that in January, despite the impeaching darkness and the kind of cold that makes our teeth rattle, we will be born anew, thrust vibrantly into good health, a point of abundance in a season of spareness.

But when my December small-talk turns focus to resolutions and next years plans, I am often met with indifference or disgust. ‘Don’t tell me to be better!’, they seem to be saying with their eyes, forgetting perhaps, or never knowing, that I talk for talks sake. Anxiety seems to seep out from everyone. So afraid of speaking of and failing at something we haven’t even yet attempted, we won’t even tell it to ourselves.

Each year the year seems to become shorter and I seem to change less and I start to understand what the grown ups have always meant about time passing like the blink of an eye. My friend messaged with pictures from eight years ago when we all met. We were eighteen. It’s funny really, how the years have just flicked by so lightly, as if you could drop them, like a handful of paper drifting to the ground after a knock to the shoulder.

There is a paragraph from the Bell Jar (a book I haven’t read) that gets regularly circulated on the part of the internet I tend to find myself. It’s about a fig tree.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

There seems to be no greater tragedy than unrealised potential. When we are young, we worry that we are not making the right decisions. Whether we think closely on it or not, we all know that one thing leads to another. Make the wrong choices or indeed no choices at all, the world will keep spinning and the result may not be favourable.

This was the subject of my complete breakdown when I graduated from art school. I was talking to a friend about it the other day. Having had a total all-encompassing existential crisis about my inability to lay out the path of my life like neat paving stones, in retrospect, seems completely absurd. But at the time it felt like I was dying under the weight of it all.

Yesterday, I missed my alarm and woke up silently yelling the words to ‘Cobra’ by Geese. I danced as I got dressed. I quietly screamed the words at myself in the mirror in the bathroom. I sang as I brushed my teeth. I shook my shoulders and my knees and ticked my chin backwards and forwards as I put bread in the toaster.

I’ve been trying to figure out my feelings about Geese and Cameron Winter’s solo album. It gives me a funny pain in my chest. My throat goes dry. I am sad and happy and in awe, ecstatic and overcome by tragedy and beauty, worry and wonder. Feeling as old as the earth and as young morning dew, full of potential and past it all at once.

The album ‘Getting Killed’ that came out this year has been hailed as generational. I don’t argue. In combination with Zohran Mamdani’s election win, this album has contributed to a kind of a cultural renaissance in New York despite the wider fascist tendencies of the US. This album, along with being brilliant in a bodily way, confirms that my generation can change things. We can shape the world in our image. It’s our moment in the sun.

I think it is an ordinary part of the human condition to worry about the use of your life. I think it is quite normal to be concerned with your mortality, with your time and with whether you are doing justice to the strange strike of luck it is to find oneself alive. What I think a new year ought to do is remind us of the passing of time, remind us that we ought to be grateful and that we should do justice to this grand and random gift.

How to do that, of course, is a difficult thing to decide. It is easy to become so overwhelmed by indecision that we allow our lives to dictate the direction for us. I have not yet decided even, whether it is better to allow this, to succumb to things and make peace with how the story goes when you don’t force it any which way, or whether instead you should insist on a direction of a travel, push your life to go where your dreams dictate. I suppose with most things the answer sits somewhere in between. We can never know for certain that we won’t one day wish we’d done things differently. There is always a chance of us later deciding that we took a wrong turn somewhere.

Instead of resolutions, I tend to consider the approach I want to take to the year, as if I were approaching a high jump and picking out my shoes. I had planned on being leisurely in 2025. I had wanted to think about rest and enjoyment. ‘Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans’, as people tirelessly say, so of course, I didn’t do many of things I had intended to. But I swam and I wrote and I read and that as the sum of things is a success to me.

In this new year, I want to make total use of the things in front of me. I want to fill up my life. I want to stop letting things pass by, be less laissez faire. I have noticed that I do not run for the bus. I have noticed that I do not care enough to run for the bus. I would like to care. I find that in the general rhythm of things our clarified ideas slip from view and we are just a set of eyes passing from the pavement to the train station to the desk to the bed. I think we are worse for this in winter and therefore it is extra mean to mark the end of the year here and tally up the scores.

As we set down our tools for the ending of things, I look around me. It’s like the moment when the music turns off and the club lights come on. People go for their coats. Someone starts sweeping the floor with a percussive broom. I begin to wonder how I will get home.