Happy New Year

A very dear friend of mine starts each year by naming it; 2013 was The Year of Joy, and this year was The Year of Bravery. I’m looking forward to finding out the word she’s chosen for 2015. Looking back on this year, I would retrospectively call it either The Year of Illness (we caught everything; I’ve had gastro twice in the last couple of months. TWICE!!) or The Year of Sad (hello, Depression. I hate you. Please leave). Perhaps I could combine the two and call it The Year of Feeling Terrible? I have a feeling none of these options are included on my friend’s list of potential words to embrace for next year.

Apart from a handful of moments of pure joy (at Michael Franti’s concert during I’m Alive, when the chorus started and tiny pieces of paper and giant yellow balls shot out over the crowd; dancing my heart out at No Lights No Lycra with one of my best buddies; getting stuck halfway down a slippery dip with Hazel when the Ergo strap got caught around the top; multiple times during the Uniting Women’s Conference; opening the oven while baking and discovering my cake had grown an anus) and a couple of achievements (surviving a whole year with two kids! Finishing my Grad Dip!), 2014 was not great. I’m very happy to leave 2014 behind.

I like that our calendar lets us start afresh every 12 months, although I keep having to remind myself that there’s nothing magical about January 1st. I will still be me tomorrow. So if I was to name 2015 – to give it a theme as a starting point for making my resolutions and a benchmark for keeping them – though I’d like to choose something upbeat like my friend’s The Year of Joy or (more generally) The Year of Awesomeness, I’ve decided the most fitting option will be The Year of No Excuses. Or The Year of Just Do It. I need just one word, though… The Year of Action?

In 2015 I may still be depressed, unfit, lazy, pimply, addicted to liquorice allsorts, and unable to explain my theology, but it won’t be because I’m making no effort whatsoever to leave those things behind. There will be effort. There will be whinging. Hopefully there will also be change. Hopefully always for the better.

I was going to list a heap of books and movies I enjoyed that were released in 2014, thinking I was finally hip and with it, until I discovered that many of the books and movies I had in mind actually came out ages ago. Two books can stay: The Wife Drought by Annabel Crabb, which was inspiring in a life-changing way, and One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak, which I forgot to mention on my blog when I read it but really should have because it ended up being the funnest and funniest book I read all year and was inspiring in a maybe-I-could-write-short-stories way. The other books I particularly enjoyed that would have made it onto the list if they were published in 2014 were The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion and The Last Anniversary by Liane Moriarty. Maybe I should just make it a list of things I discovered in 2014 and loved…

Girls was my favourite TV show of the year, followed closely by Parks and Recreation. Enough Said, Bridesmaids, Celeste and Jesse Forever, Brokeback Mountain and I Am were five movies that I passionately adored and can remember the names of without reading back over my reviews from the year. Liquorice allsorts were by far and away my favourite food of the year. I will miss them with every ounce of my being in 2015. My favourite songs were 400 Lux by Lorde, the ones by Rufus Wainwright I mentioned in this post, and, up the very top of the list, I’m Alive by Michael Franti: close the blinds, turn it up, and go nuts, my friends.

Here’s to a joyful, awesome, love-abundant, goal-achieving, healthy, amazing-TV-movies-and-books-filled, fun and memorable-for-good-reasons 2015!

Catch you on the flip side.