Here we are at the end of 2020, and the Internet is flooded with people looking ahead to the brighter possibilities of 2021.

Of course, the division between the years is arbitrary. Though vaccines give us reason to be hopeful that the end of the pandemic is in sight, we are still very much in it. And we’ll still be in it when the calendar page flips to January. Some optimism is reasonable, but it’s delusional to imagine that there will be a drastic change in our circumstances from Friday forward.

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Recently, I got to hug some family members for the first time since January.

A combination of traveling and the good ol’ pandemic kept me away — at least a few hours away, and sometimes a thousand miles away. But finally, outdoors on a beautiful day, none of us having gone anywhere recently, it was time to embrace.

I had been so anxious about missing them and missing so much of their lives. Kids change so fast. Would they even remember me? But within moments it was as though no time had passed. Just like old times, except in masks.

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The last day of school was always sometime in June — June 16, maybe, or June 21 if there had been a lot of snow days — and that was it. It’s finally warm outside, there are finally leaves on the trees, and you’re finally free. A perfect transition from one grade to the next, with a nearly three-month buffer between the two.

The feeling of absolute freedom has stayed with me. No obligations, no dangling threads. As an educator, I follow the rhythms of the school year, but I no longer get to experience a clean break in which all of my projects end at the same time. Three-month vacations are a thing of the past as well, sorry to say.

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Okay, technically it hasn’t been daily blogging. I do give myself (and you) the weekends off.

But on February 28, 2019, I wrote my first article and clicked “publish.” And I’ve done it every weekday since then. And I have learned a lot over the past year.

There are two things that stand out the most. Unsurprisingly, they mirror the themes I like to talk about in my articles.

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It’s the first day of a new year. Unblemished and unbroken like an overnight snowfall that no one’s had a chance to walk upon.

Inevitably, it will get messed up — the snow and the year. What then?

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