Tonight... we dine!!!

2018 Wrap-Up

Greetings and salutations everyone! The time is here; 2019 is upon us. I wish everyone the best as you ring the new year with your fireworks, fried chicken with collard greens and black-eyed-peas (the dish, not the group), champagne, or whatever may happen to be your new years eve tradition. For many people, this is the night when they let it all hang out. Many people, choose this time to get well lubricated with abnormal amounts of liquid courage and bring in their new year by letting the food, alcohol, and bad decisions flow in abundance; to which I say, "Whatever makes you happy fam."

I suppose you can say that I'm at a point in my life where that manner of ringing in the new year is no longer appealing to me. If you live long enough you either become comfortable with where you are and stop growing, or you realize that growth is necessary if you want to move beyond your current circumstances to better circumstances. Such is the normal cycle of life... possibly... experts are still divided on this. One of the things I've recently begun to do around this time of year is to reflect on the previous year in an attempt to get high-level view of how things have gone. My wife and I call this process the after action report (which apparently has become just as important in corporate environments as it is in military environments). When I look back over this year, it's been a doozie, and from what I've heard from many of my friends family, and peers, that sentiment seems to be reverberating at very least throughout my circle of associates. From a business perspective, this year seemed to be extremely volatile and uncertain; markets had dramatic up and down swings on pretty much a daily basis. What's interesting is that according to experts, things weren't abnormally volatile this year, they were abnormally stable last year, which made this year seem volatile by comparison.

I find this perspective rather interesting. It seems that many of us have gotten so accustomed to the abnormal that the normal makes us nervous. Everyone seems to want the feast without the famine; the success without the struggle, but history is replete with examples of icons for whom failure was a necessary part of their eventual success. That being said, knowing that difficulty/failure will eventually lead to success does very little to take the sting out of said difficulty/failure in the moment. For many people, the only way to deal with these challenges is to find something to distract from them. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people spend their new years eve numbing themselves to the year they're about to close the book on? I'm not here to be the fun police, so I'll just say that whatever your vise of choice, be sure to enjoy it responsibly and with moderation. Remember that the challenges are both temporary, and a necessary step in the process of getting to where you want to go; don't let them be the thing that ends your journey. Tomorrow, you may have to get back to the business of being more awesome than you were before, but for now, you can feel free to announce these wise words with a voice of bravado, "Tonight We Dine!!!"