2024

2024 was rough. No year-end lists this time. Just one thing I finally figured out that helped me get through it.

Took me long enough to realize something obvious: I've been thinking about life wrong.

For years, I treated life like one continuous thing. A river, a thread, whatever metaphor you want. One long process from start to finish. Made sense at the time.

Turns out that's bullshit.

Life isn't continuous. It's a bunch of chunks. Moments with clear starts and ends. Call them scenes, fragments, whatever. The point is they're discrete. Each one complete on its own.

What makes something a moment? Change. Sometimes obvious - a trip ends, a meeting finishes, you hang up the phone. Sometimes subtle - you notice you feel different than you did an hour ago. Either way, boundaries exist.

Here's what helped: that shitty meeting you just had? It ended. It's not going to last forever. That perfect afternoon with your kid? Same thing - it's complete, it happened, you can hold onto it as its own thing.

Nothing lasts forever. Not the bad stuff, not the good stuff. Each difficult phase has an expiration date. Each moment of joy is precious because it's temporary. "This too shall pass" stops being a cliché and becomes actually useful.

This clicked for me during the London trip in December. Overwhelming days became manageable when I remembered they'd end. Rest periods stopped feeling like failure and started feeling like necessary pauses. The anxiety, the exhaustion, all that crap - easier to handle when you know it's temporary.

Simple shift. Stop thinking infinite scroll, start thinking pages. Everything has limits. Everything has structure.

Endings matter as much as beginnings. When things suck, you can remember that better moments exist and will come back. When things are good, you pay more attention because you know it won't last forever.

Past difficulties? Contained stories, not recurring nightmares. Future challenges? Bounded experiences, not endless threats. Good moments become something to fully live instead of just pleasant interruptions.

Is this easy to maintain? Hell no. The old way of thinking runs deep. But out of everything this year taught me, this perspective helped the most. Brings peace when things are hard. Makes you appreciate things when they're good.

Everything ends. Everything begins again. Not as a river, but as a sequence of distinct moments. Each with its own story.

Recognizing the boundaries doesn't diminish anything. It makes you appreciate what each moment actually is. Your life isn't one endless stream - it's an anthology. Each piece worth looking at on its own.

Here's to 2025. Hopefully a better year, one moment at a time.