The real challenge of New Year’s is not just that we write the wrong year on documents. It’s our living the wrong life again.

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I finally started my Bullet Journal for 2019. It isn’t pretty and I’m not showing off all my beautiful pages. But the fact that we are nearly a week into 2019 before I’ve gotten started is representative of a part of life we rarely truly wrestle with. For many of us, procrastination isn’t the problem: it’s the calming effect of busyness.

As a church pastor, Christmas is one of our biggest times of the year. As a priest, it’s even busier, with all the extra services and feasts and visits. And when you’ve got a family… well, you get the picture.

For many of us, however, we secretly live for this time. Sharing our busyness feels good, kind of like sharing a secret vice. It’s work porn. So we tell ourselves that it’s all necessary and for the greater good when really it’s hiding the shame and emptiness of work that never ends.

The arbitrary flipping of the calendar seems more monumental than it is. And given the calendar of the church year, it’s even more arbitrary.

• Our church year begins with the first Sunday in Advent.
• Then we count down until the first principle feast of the year: the Feast of the Incarnation, otherwise known as Christmas.
• Then we count days of Christmas, in part to get us to the eighth day when Jesus would be named and circumcised.
• And quickly we’re celebrating the second principle feast of the year on January 6th: the Epiphany.

For liturgical Christians, there’s a challenge to keeping two calendars at the same time: the church one and the “real” one.

Putting the church first

That’s why for many years I flipped the script and made the church one the “real” one and the Gregorian calendar we all use is the “other” one. But really, it gets lonely when nobody else is thinking in those terms with you.

Come December 31, everyone else is focused on New Year’s and we’ve still got a lot of Christmas left. Keeping the church year first gets really hard.

A New Year is Arbitrary.

The funny thing about New Year’s is that it is fundamentally arbitrary. Yes, we use an elaborate dating system which depends on the changing of years which govern our budgets and organizing structures. But all of these have a fundamental arbitrariness to them as well.

We’ve all simply agreed to count a year and start it here. This alone is weird. Weirder when we talk about time.

Down at the root, our lives are no more governed by our calendars than they are by our jobs. Our worth is not defined by what our bosses think of us, nor is our humanity defined by having a New Year’s resolution primed and ready to go for January 1.

But because our brains crave order and symmetry, we look at these numbers on our calendars, these spreadsheets we’ve chosen to fundamentally order our lives and determine when we meet and how to classify this moment in time.

Today is Tuesday, January 15th. Tomorrow will be Wednesday. Perhaps you will read this on a Thursday. I write this in 2019 and perhaps today, your today is 2020 or 2021.

Perhaps I will repost this five years from now and it will be for you five years old.

And when you read this none of us will care about the resolutions from 2019 or the negativity which blocked us for so many months.

The urgency of our now undermines the joy of forgetting, the beauty of reorienting, and the excitement of trying something new.

Now 2019 can begin.

OK, yes, the calendar flipped two weeks ago. We finished Christmas and got through the Epiphany. I’ve named my three words for the year and finally broke in my Bullet Journal.

And to be totally honest, I started this post a week ago! The day I started my new bullet journal. The day I actually gave myself the chance to start 2019.

It’s a week after that thought. In that time I’ve tweaked my journal a little, started organizing my time for the new year.

I started meditating and writing nearly every day again. I’m reading more regularly and taking more charge of myself. I’ve blended the different New Year New You challenges I’ve taken on (10% Happier and Evernote both offer a month-long challenge) with what I know about new year’s resolutions.

I’m choosing to create an order in my life that respects my health and well-being based on what will work for me.

And at the center of that is engaging the sense of self that always puts other people first, refuses to accept a compliment, and rejects any suggestion that I may be worth a damn.

Today, I am willing to listen when God says “You are my child, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” and practice what I preach.

Now I’m ready for the new year to begin. Finally. And enthusiastically.