A deferred annuity of the New Year’s type

Along with the season’s lamentations about the institutionalized prostitution of the Christians’ Savior’s birth
rampant commercialization of Christmas, proliferation of meaningless college bowl games whose only legitimacy is a sponsor tripping over itself to shoehorn their name into the game’s title, and my own personal ‘lull’ time between academic periods comes the season’s perorating of various and sundry predictions, reflections, ‘best of’ lists and ‘what you missed and why you cared’ reminders.

In the spirit of trying to cooperate with the zeitgeist this particular page on the calendar shows, can I suggest something a little more fruitful?

This time last year my life was a lot different; there was a girl over whom I was obsessing, what I liked on TV was a lot different, school, job and life in general were all well, just different. Very different.

A lot of changes have come, gone, and settled over my word in the past year, and thankfully I’ve got an infallible record of a great deal of it.

One of the No, the most cherished things I have on this planet are the journals I’ve kept on my computer since January or so of 2000 (also known as my freshman year in college). Thankfully, they all live on my machine in Word format, so if the apartment were to ever burn, or I were to ever be suddenly spirited away by the NFL or DCCC, little of my precious brainspace in those hurried moments would be expended upon where my true treasures lay. Just grab the machine and go.

Sort of a tradition I’ve developed in these years has been to make the time to write at standard landmarks on the calendar, times like my birthday, Christmas, end of the academic year, the Superbowl, and a few others. A spiritual discipline such as that serves as a very healthy way to pass the time, perhaps the very best I’ve found for measuring the gaunt and solitary whispers time leaves as proof of its passing.

The reason why those journals are of such value to me I guess manifested yesterday morning, when I went to see what I’d written about my life This Time last year.

I was a lot different guy, for good and bad. Yesterday morning I was pretty depressed too, and well, those journals were so welcome an expert’s opinion on me that they picked me up for the rest of the day, reminded me that despite everything to the contrary, life in fact does have meaning and so do I. I read somewhere recently (today? at church this morning? last week?) that at the core, Christians are simply people who don’t give up, people who endure, and studying the ways the Lord has sustained me over calendar year 2007 gives me the strength to zero in on hope for the same in 2k8.

And that has happened time and time again over the years, such that I think I’ve internalized it just like expecting to have the summers off and autumn Sunday afternoons free for football. The same way I set aside savings, I just do it and don’t think about it-till I need last year’s perspective on things.

Set no rhythm to it and establish no goals or format.

Just do it occasionally, whenever you feel like it or have something you’ll appreciate revisiting.

Do it during big life events, like a sibling’s wedding or a friend’s giving birth or after some big trip.

Do it on your birthday, next Christmas, and sometime in the vicinity of New Year’s.

Do yourself a favor, make an investment in tomorrow by writing about today-because this time next year, today’ll be the past. And it’ll happen before you know it.