Well, here we are in 2025.
I’m gonna turn 50 this year.
If things go according to plan, I’m around the halfway point of my career teaching high school students.
So my New Year’s Resolutioning is a little more intense this time around compared to the usual.
(Whether my commitment to those resolutions is any more intense than usual remains to be seen.)
I’m carrying out one of those resolutions now. I haven’t exactly stopped reflecting on things at any point, but I have been less conscientious about putting my thoughts in writing. I think that needs to change. In this era of ChatGPT, I stress to my students that the process of working out their ideas is more important than whatever finished product results. I see many of the educators I follow on Bluesky repeat the idea that writing is thinking. I agree with that, and I think I have gotten away from it.
I still do a lot of writing to prepare the materials I use with my students, so I haven’t completely abandoned it, but I think I could be using it better as a method of personal and professional reflection. Some of that writing will probably stay private, but I would like to be in dialogue with the world a little bit more. So here’s hoping WordPress and I are up to the task.
I’m sitting here at my keyboard right now looking at that last line and thinking about what might stop me, what might derail this resolution in a few days or weeks. To be honest, one thing that might do it is in the second line of this piece. I’m getting older. I’m feeling older. Unfortunately, not in the sense that I feel wise or confident, but in the sense that I just feel tired more often than I would like. So some of the other resolutions are about trying to get the body and the brain that is me into better shape. More on that another time.
But the other thing that makes me tired is that the crisis of confidence I wrote about the last time I sat down to do some extended writing is still going on. I can’t fully shake this dread that as a group, human beings are just smart enough to realize, “Hey, if we keep this up, we’re in for a lot of trouble,” and just foolish enough to decide to keep it up anyway. Part of that is the immense complexity of getting millions or billions of human beings to coordinate well enough to decide on and carry out a course of action, and in one sense we all deserve a round of applause for making it this far. But part of middle age, I think, is bearing the weight that comes from imagining how much better things could be, how much less suffering there could be, how much more joy and beauty there could be, if people had made different decisions during my lifetime. I imagine that gap between where we are and we could have been, and then I project that gap into the rest of my life, or the rest of my students’ lives, and it bums me out.
Fighting that sense of we’re-inevitably-screwed is going to be a big part of my project for 2025.
Here’s wishing us all luck. Or, if I may quote James T. Kirk in The Voyage Home:
May fortune favor the foolish.