I regularly do two things on New Year’s Day. I climb Mount Diablo on my bike with a group of friends, and I retrieve and recycle all the pages of the bird calendar that I have stuffed under my monitor holder over the past twelve months. And of course, as part of that, I open the new Audobon bird calendar. This year’s first bird was an American Avocet.
And this year, I added another thing. I binge read Betty White obituaries, and binge watched Betty White tributes and clips on Youtube.
That all done, I am starting the year by taking two weeks off the bike and out of the gym, and I am just going to focus on what the hell it really means to be retired.
But first … working backwards.
It was freezing cold, though just a few degrees warmer than we expected. Ten of us stood around shivering at the Pleasant Hill (seriously) BART station. This ride always makes me nervous, certainly because it is always right near freezing, but more so because of the threat of black ice. Even the hint of ice on the climb means you turn around on the spot.
The cold we got for sure, but there was no ice whatsoever. It was a crystal clear day. Lots of folks climb Mount Diablo on New Year’s Day, but the numbers were definitely down this year. We always start pretty early because by the time we are descending the number of cars trying to drive up becomes a serious issue. It’s crazy because there is virtually no parking at the top, so I don’t know where they think they are going.
I climb Diablo on New Year’s Day because it is an exhilarating way to kick off a new year. It makes me feel like I have the world at my feet. I know I don’t, but the feeling is thrilling.
Here’s the team at the ranger station which is a little more than half way up. I know it looks warm, especially to anyone who lives in snow. But it was barely above freezing at that point, and we still had more climbing to do.
Once I get home, I get after the bird calendar recycling ritual. And that is depressing. For whatever reason, it makes me think of lost opportunities, failed moments. I have to do it quickly, and I don’t linger over any of the favorite images. It’s a little ritual of switching contexts. Like a birthday, the reality is that January 1 is just one more day. But in revisiting what might have been in one ritual, after thrilling at what might be in an earlier ritual, somehow I find the meaning of turning the page.
Like most of us, I am both optimistic and pessimistic about this new year. For me personally, the journey into discovering what I hope to be a long retirement stretches out with renewed possibility. I cleared away a couple of time-consuming commitments in the last few months of the year. So the new year is unencumbered. I have a stack of projects, and my resolution for the year is to learn how to manage those projects so that I find the productive success I am looking for.
Meanwhile, it would be foolish not to be pessimistic about the prospects for the human species. We are clearly in a new era of tyrants who bank on narrow minded bigotry among those who ought to be advocating for themselves. What fresh horrors await us? Is there somewhere in the world where some revolt against autocracy will succeed? As the pandemic becomes endemic, will the reordered world we live in find some better balance? Is this the year when even the most cynical, the billionaires and their paid political lackeys, realize that climate change will kill them too?
Who knows. As my aged mother would say, we’ll just have to wait and see.
So I’m just going to pursue what I do, and no doubt others will do the same. In that sense, then, yes, let's give it the ol' college try! Probably gonna be another bitchin’ disaster, but we should be like Betty White and see the positive in it, some how, some way.