2025: The Journey of A New Year

Dr. Norris Frederick

I’ve been traveling down interstates 77 and 81 for about 3 hours, and the roar of trucks going 75 mph is getting to me.  I’m on the way to the Virginia mountains in the fall of 2017 for a hike.  As I take a rest stop break near Roanoke, I look at the map and see what looks like good roads that will get me off the interstate NOW.  I can’t wait to start this journey to Hot Springs through the back roads.

I’m exhilarated as I leave I-81 and get on route 311, a nice two-lane with newly painted white stripes dividing the road.  The quiet, the clear view of nearby grass and trees in sight as I travel at 45 mph instead of 70 on the barren interstate.  How wonderful it is to take the back roads!  I sigh with relaxation and happiness.

But things change.  After a while, my route takes a right, and I notice that there is no center line at all.  The road takes sharp turns first to the left, then back again to the right, and I feel a touch of motion sickness.  I pass through the small town of New Castle, which amazingly has a Subway, and I consider stopping.  But I’m already behind schedule to meet my friend, so I keep on driving, munching on trail-mix. As I leave the town, I get behind a car creeping along, and I’m very frustrated.

Twenty minutes later I’m driving through a forest. It’s suddenly become very dark, and my car’s GPS signal has disappeared.  There’s a “Road Narrows” sign, and after the road indeed does narrow there is a “Narrow Bridge” sign.

After a while, there’s another tiny bridge — this time with no warning sign. 

Then the road narrows again until I think that surely I must be driving in someone’s driveway, just big enough for one car.

Why did I come on this stupid journey?  Impulsiveness?  A lack of persistence, when my destination was clear on well-marked roads?

In a period of about 90 minutes, the mental frame with which I was understanding and feeling the drive changed dramatically.  What I originally framed as an exciting and meaningful “journey” was unconsciously primed by my perceptions of the growing dark and the narrowing, unmarked, and unsigned road to an experience of being endangered or lost.  I felt a bit like cattle being herded into a dead-end canyon.  I wanted OUT OF THERE!

Not unlike many of us as we face 2025 and think about our self, family and friends, community, nation and/or world:  anxiety, puzzlement, anger, fear —  we want OUT OF HERE!

 

We want to be somewhere else, or some other time, or some other person!  As the Bruce Springsteen song goes,

“I check my look in the mirror
Wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face…”

Journeys 

The idea that my life, my year, or my day is “a journey” is a powerful metaphor.  “Journey” and “journal” come from the same Old French and Latin roots for “day,” the former meaning a day’s travel or work, the latter meaning a daily record.  Unlike “trip,” “journey” implies a travel of considerable distance[1],  and by implication, I think, “journey” also implies meaningful travel, just as a journal is an effort to record meaning in one’s life.

Every physical journey has an inward side, the awareness and state of consciousness of the person on the journey.

 

Too often we are like me on the back roads of the Virginia mountains. 

 

We experience boredom, then excitement as the journey commences, followed soon by fear and worry – of being lost or late, or not achieving goals, or some possible future event.  

I went from unrealistic optimism to pessimism, and felt myself helpless.  A much more useful attitude would be realistic optimism.  Being a realistic optimist does not mean that we must be complacent in the face of pain and troubles.  Such a person is an optimist, but also realistic, and acknowledges the challenges and suffering ahead.

Perhaps even more useful is “meliorism.”  William James uses this word to indicate a mediating outlook between optimism and pessimism. The Latin root of “melioirism” means “better” (as in the word, “ameliorate”).  As James puts it, meliorism holds that with human effort, “improvement is at least possible.”

When we reframe the situation in terms of meliorism, we see ourselves in the frame as agents who can make a difference.

Look around at home, friends, and society:  what could be made better?  Hopefully, most of us will not have to overcome challenges as great as those faced by the Lewis and Clark expedition, but isn’t there a fighting chance that if we and enough others bring about certain conditions,  we can improve education, cooperation, trust, housing, nutrition, personal responsibility, meaningful freedom, and more?

As it turned out, I wasn’t lost on that journey on the back roads.  I just kept driving, focusing on the tasks in front of me.  Despite my needless worry, my journey was as worthwhile as my destination.

Here is a video snippet I filmed on the hiking journey:

This Year

Don’t miss seeing the beauty in front of you, even in hard times.

Every year – especially this year – we wait for the new year and for some transforming event for the journey to begin.  We don’t see what is right in front of us.  In that waiting and not seeing,  we miss our lives.  As Aileen and Elkin Thomas sing so beautifully in their song “The Journey” (click to listen), the journey’s all the time:

“Of all the time and space our lives have occupied,
Right now is where we’ve come to be,
The journey’s not what’s going to be,
The journey’s all the time,
The journey’s all the time.”

Every day and every hour offers us possibilities.  If we are aware of what is unconsciously framing and influencing our experience, we have a better chance of consciously re-framing that experience in a way that is both more workable and meaningful.  We need to train ourselves to do that, but awareness is the first step.

May your journey in 2025 be a meaningful one,

may you make some small part of the world better,

and may you experience joy.

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[1] Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition (The World Publishing Company, 1960).

Photo by Alex Jones on Unsplash

Video by Norris Frederick