“Five!” I hear a distant cheer emanating from the television sitting across the room. My eyes open to catch a screen scattered with a few faces half-covered in brightly-colored and sequin-filled masks. “Four, three, two, one!” I spot the enormous glittery sphere descend from the top of a pole in Times Square, bringing in the New Year of 2021. The scene painted the perfect picture to end the year 2020. For the majority of the year, huge portions of my life have shifted from in-person to sharing with a screen. Although it did usher in new opportunities that I wouldn’t have otherwise had access to, it also highlighted the empty space sitting between the faces on each side of the screen.
The ongoing over-arching plot of the series, “Earth 2020,” was played out with a pandemic caused by the Coronavirus. This dystopian themed setting doesn’t even include the different episodes of people’s lives that took them on their own difficult journeys. People did not foresee many of these new problems, and no one could have predicted what happened last year unless they moonlighted as a time traveler.
As the ball dropped above white bulbs arranged in the numerical symbol for 2021 and a big flashing video of a car commercial, I thought about what my New Year’s Resolutions should be. At many points in 2020, I had to shift, cancel, or put a lot of things on hold. My plans for the year were laughed at by the universe, and many of them were subject to change at the drop of a hat. I didn’t want to get too far ahead and set myself up for possible disappointment, but I also wanted to have tangible goals moving forward into the New Year. So, when it came time for me to decide what my New Year’s Resolutions were, I decided to push the amount from a handful to 365 New Year’s Resolutions.
Every day when I wake up in the year 2021, I will position myself to go with the flow of things. My goal is to chart out a flexible path for each day and follow it to the best of my ability. Essentially, I want to accomplish the tasks I set out for myself to do each day and be able to be okay with not getting everything done if it was out of my hands. I will still plan for things months away, but I will do so with the knowledge that there can be a completely different world when I wake up tomorrow, and I will have to adapt my plans. So, instead of one or two resolutions, I will have 365 New Year’s Resolutions for each day I wake up in 2021.
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