2013 a review of my year

2013:  A Look Back into what Happened in my Life this Year

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            When I was a bit younger there was a popular song with the line “time keeps on slipping into the future” and so 2013 being spoken of in the present tense is rapidly coming to an end.  Like I do most years I began 2013 with some New Year’s resolutions and will end the year with not much success in those resolutions to lose weight or keep a neat and organized house, and the other resolutions that I don’t remember probably met with about as much success.  Still I look back and believe that overall it has been one of the best of years in many years.

            I will attribute “social networking” to making 2013 one of my better years.  Before 2013 I had a couple of internet websites I would often read, but it was not until my nephew declared at Thanksgiving in 2012 that I needed to be on Facebook and began entering me on Facebook rather than waiting for me to do so, that I was involved in social networking.

            My life, up until that point was trending towards the life of a recluse.  I had my job, I went to church on Sunday, and besides that I was at home unless I was running some necessary errand.  I am sure of some of the causes, unsure of others, and admit a simple personal tendency to being something of a recluse.  That is something I can probably discuss in another blog.  But by the end of 2012 my world had become small, somewhat safe, but more stoic than happy or fulfilled.  With Facebook changes began to take place.  I reconnected to people I had lost track of during the years.  Sometimes the reconnections were with people where our friendships had been tested, harmed, or simply neglected so these reconnections weren’t always easy.  Some of these reconnections are still sort of in that stage.  We’ve reconnected but there are differences to be first respected and we are looking towards a sort of normalization to a friendship.  That will take more time in some relationships than others.  But those first cautious steps have been taken.  There have also been new friendships.  Both sorts of friendships are important.  The painful reconnecting process should make us more careful to tend with kindness our new relationships.  So Facebook helped me to reconnect to some old friends, to begin dealing with some broken relationships, and to make a few new ones.  Those were all pretty important for me in 2013.

            I began to write blogs.  Some of my first blogs were on movies I had watched.  A Netflix subscription in 2012 led me to begin watching more movies.  My low spiritual condition led me to watching some movies that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have watched.  One of these not very wholesome movies was the sort of movie that as a Christian you cringe at a couple of scenes, but the movie was a profound look at someone who is struggling to arrive to a point of having a stable self-identity.  The French movie “Don’t Look Back” is a sort of philosophical / psychological /horror genre movie.  It is a story of a woman seeking to discover who she really is.  She has virtually no memories of her life before she was eight years old and she struggles with a sense that she does not know who she is so she begins to question the stories of who she was before she was eight years old; the stories others told her of herself and she depended on for a link to her past.  I had always been the sort of person who saw self-esteem or self-identity as categories that had been created by modernists that could well be discarded in a world of feely touchy sort of handling of things.  But this movie showed me that ultimately such issues are the screams or muted concerns that something really important about the story of our human life has been left out, and is missing from our understanding.  There was an echo of that understanding of human life, especially of modern human life in our Western Civilization that resounded throughout many of the things I saw and felt in 2013.  I feel as if I see multitudes of people saying to those they depended on for the story of their lives, “I feel like you left something out of the stories you told me of my life.”  That is I believe a central theme to understanding modernity.  We feel as if something has been left out of our story.

            Through Facebook and then later Twitter I began to read a lot of blogs by people with perspectives I had never before considered.  On Facebook most of my contacts were people near my age.  On Twitter, some circumstances led me to forming contacts mostly with people much younger than I.  Many of them were disenchanted children of Conservative Evangelicals.  I had this interesting split world of speaking in one forum mostly with convinced conservative Evangelicals and on this other forum I was having conversations with those who felt that when they had questions they had become unwelcomed threats to the Evangelical and Conservative sub-cultures in which they had grown up.  If ever there were a group of people who felt that someone had left out important elements to their life story it was these twenty and thirty-something year old young adults disenchanted with their conservative upbringing.  I did not find them to be self-centered narcissistic brats unthankful for what they had been given, just people seeking answers to questions that bothered them.  I suspect that some within their generation will discover answers that fit the needs of their generation.  But I felt like I was connected to people asking important questions even if their questions did challenge my way of life and thinking.

            Towards the end of this year I commented to one of the people I met on Twitter how I was using some of what she said in my writing of a blog.  She paid me a compliment on my writing.  I realized as I read the compliment that my writing had started changing this year because this was the year that I came into contact with such a diverse group of people such as I had never known before.  My thoughts and ways of life were challenged.  I have had to adapt to write to a more diverse group of people.

But perhaps the greatest change to come over me this year was how I see these diverse people.  A little more than a year ago I would have tried to categorize people with whether or not they fit into my small place in life.  But now it has sunk in to my mind and heart that I am and others around me are people who are trying to sort out the things in life because they and I too have this sneaking suspicion that something is missing in regards to the stories that were told us to explain our lives.   To every one of you involved in with me this year, you are a part of how I learned this.  Thank you so very much.  May your 2014 be a year in which you get a sense that you are coming to understand some of the stories that explain your life.