New year, new you. Except it’s not a new me. It’s still just Normal Emily, doing the same things, over and over again. So you go to work. You go home. You go to school. You come home. You stress over things that don’t matter. You relax when you realize they don’t matter. You hang out with your friends, and it’s fun. You do something embarrassing, and it’s not fun anymore. You forget about the embarrassing thing, and life moves on.
You eat, three times a day. Why do we have to eat so often? You like some of the food. You forget it the next day. You hate some of the food. You forget that the next day too. Some nights you don’t get enough sleep. But you function anyway. Some nights you do get enough sleep. You’re tired anyway.
Life is a cycle, and nothing ever changes. Not really. You laugh, you cry, and then you laugh again. The sun comes out one day. It storms the next day. The next day the sun comes out again.
Life hurts, but not always. Life is good, but not always.
You make friends, you lose friends, you make new friends. People get married, people are born, people die, and in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter?
And yet.
And yet you can’t shake the feeling that it does matter. The beauty of the first winter snowflakes matters. That moment when you step in a puddle with socks on matters. The satisfying sigh at the end of a good book matters. The tears, the laughter, the secret smiles with friends, somehow they all matter.
It doesn’t make sense, but somehow we know that these things matter. That every little thing is changing us somehow, making us different. Because in the end, our life just consists of a bunch of random unimportant moments stacked on top of each other, but you look back and realize that somehow all those unimportant moments changed you.
The stress of a bad grade on a school assignment. The pain of watching friends move on to bigger things. Those embarrassing moments that make you want to hide in the closet. They change you, impact your view of the world, of yourself.
The victory of winning a race for the first time. The beauty of the changing seasons. That one friend you knew in elementary school that you haven’t seen in fifteen years. Those things change you. They impact your view of the world.
So maybe the circumstances never really change. But you change. Maybe life is just a cycle of goods and bads, ups and downs. Maybe the circumstances don’t matter, but your reactions do matter.
Maybe even the restlessness means something. Maybe even the restlessness is changing me for the better.