‘Next year will be better’ people proclaim as the last few days of the year which brought us Brexit, Trump and a plethora of dead celebrities, comes to an end. ‘Will’ as if the passage of time has an indefinite telos towards progression, towards ‘it must be better.’ 

‘It’ is the illustrative word towards a mindset where human agency is removed – better things WILL just happen if we throw around nonchalant remarks of betterment. I’ll wake up on the 1st of January and things WILL be better, simply because of time. Time is a futile, whimsical thing, so too is ‘willing’ things to happen without some course of action or a conscious decision rather than an entitled, presumptuous, statement. This arbitrary separation of time gives us an excuse and a scapegoat. ‘It’s been a bad day’ we say weekly, Monday is a ‘bad’ day, Friday a ‘good’ day, and the days in between sporadically flitter on a scale of good to bad. The personification of measures of time with negativity, or even positivity devoids life of the recognition of our free will – why was it a bad day? What did YOU do? Most of the time we resign ourselves to the ‘bad day’, give up in the hope that tomorrow will bring us something better. It becomes an excuse. It becomes a way to shroud our feelings in time-focused, arbitrary blame. Time becomes a scapegoat for our feelings, negativity and  positivity are attributed to the time of day, the month, the year and distort, hide, and mask the multitude of emotions and thoughts that are being felt by all humans in each moment. 

It wasn’t a bad day because it was ‘Monday’ – Monday is an abstract concept – it was a bad day because the two days of freedom we call the ‘weekend’ are over, you are unsatisfied with the measly two days off, you want to spend time with your family, you’re unhappy with your job, you are stressed, you are tired of the mundane cycle of time. When the umbrella of ‘Monday: the bad day’ collapses, we are confronted with rainfall; each drop symbolising an emotion, and the complexity of ‘a bad day’ is revealed.

If this deconstruction happens to a ‘bad day’ what about a year, and what about a ‘good’ day? A good day is mostly forgotten unless it is ‘the best day’, and when all these days are accumulated into a year, it is predominantly the worst, bad and best that stand out: negativity ultimately predominates in this language of time. 

I am not going to resign myself to blaming things on time, on using the sweeping statement of: ‘2016 was the worst year’ to define a moment of my life. Yes, I lost my dad, which is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, because I will not see him again in this life. But, I spent my last moments with him – there are happy memories intertwined with the pain. I am not going to define this year negatively, instead I am going to celebrate the achievements: I was successful in getting a promotion and I graduated with a 2:1. I have had over a year away from blogging, letting the negative events in the last year prevent me from producing what I enjoy. I am not going to look at time in days, months, years, but in the broader scale of life, which can end at any time.