Time Rolls Forward

December 18, 2025

            On Thursday, while I was messaging with my friend in a faraway land she texted, It is amazing how the day can end so quickly when doing nothing. 

            It struck me that this was the way I felt about the year. I did nothing, it passed so quickly. 

            Later I watched a 17 min video of a young woman in Florida going into a café and drawing. She drew the café and the people, as they came and went. She drew some of the food she ate and painted it in bright colours. Yes, this is what I want to do with the last days of this year I thought.

            But then there was the other desire of filling the hours with things I didn’t do all year. Stop analysing the reasons why you didn’t do anything and do some of the things you wished you had done, this voice said. Like going back to that book – the only novel I have written that I must get out into the world before I die. The issue still burns for me and nobody else has written about it that I know of. And when this desire grips, I wake up at night and roll around with ideas and frustrations. And in the morning on 2 hours sleep I try to re-work some of the pages. 

            Drawing in a café is being present to the moment. For me a not-professional-artist, it is a task that doesn’t have a purpose beyond doing it then. I will never make it into an art piece and sell it or show it to the world in a u-tube video. And that purposeless time has much meaning.

            Wandering the streets or the forest also has the same feel. Maybe with the added feel that doing this might help me find the self I still feel I have lost in this year. It is true that I have lost it. Small things like not knowing what is in the box on my desk, which at the beginning of the year I opened and used every day tell me that something has changed during the year.

Reality is not continuous, is it? But sometimes I pretend it is. My thoughts at the end of the year come in fragments, which I try to string together into something whole and sometimes convince myself that I have done so. That I have solved the puzzle of this year, answered the burning question.

I don’t know what the question is yet. And that’s somehow ok. Because we don’t know the questions that drive us in life though often, we pretend to? 

I see now, after the blood pressure stabilised that the things in my life that regulated stress and perhaps with that blood pressure, had become distant from me as the year progressed. When the knee got injured, everything did change though I clung to the idea that I was managing well despite it. I trained less and when I did train it was always through pain and the fear that there would be consequences — like more pain, and swelling, and further injury. 

I wrote less because at one time writing and training were somehow linked so instead of writing more as I trained less I did less of that too. And both these help regulate stress and pressure. And I read less until September when some inner impulse urged me to read the booker list.

Every day, for the first week after I saw my blood test results I wrote in my journal — I felt lost (when I saw them), I feel lost, I might continue to be lost. And on the last day it changed to I felt lost, I feel lost, I will try to feel less lost. And I did find a measure of peace, until Friday. The organ that might be dysfunctional is the kidney. The kidney is one of the bodies filtration systems, it remove toxins from the body. It’s ability to do this seemed to be slowing down. In the last two weeks I journalled a lot about the psycho-spiritual toxins within — resentments and angers in relationships, anxieties and never-ending fears about the future. They had built up. I can’t say I have filtered them all from within, but the process begun has brought peace. 

Until Friday when the spouse suggested I go in for my blood test a bit earlier than I was supposed to. He said, we might know if things have shifted before Christmas, then. I fell into disarray, chaos. I didn’t want to find out that the numbers were worse. The inner-safety I had built, perhaps through some rigid routines, fell apart. I had worked in a steady groove for two weeks but again the lostness invaded. We did go for the test and then to the pen shop and got a shiny new pen and ink I didn’t need. It was comfort shopping. I hadn’t expected the upheaval to return but this is where I am today.  

But no, this year and the next are not separated by a boundary where some invisible magic will clear the difficulties of this year. They are continuous. I will not have a Hollywood ending to my year but I don’t have to frantically rush to finish some things this year so I can start the next year fresh, empty, hopeful. It sometimes happened this way in the past, like when I finished the first draft of the novel I referred to above right on December 28 in 2018 or when I got a health test result back with improvement like I did the year my potassium was high – 2020, I think. But it is ok to not have completion. It is ok to carry unfinished things into the next year.     

In 2026 I plan not to set challenges but breathe and get back to living in the moment whenever I can. More drawing, I guess. This year my sketchbook is full of faces. I like drawing faces, perhaps I can improve but I really want to draw trees and perhaps with a stronger knee I can walk more in the forest again.