Daily Herald opinion: Welcome, 2025: We’re happy to celebrate another new year; let’s prepare to make a difference in it

Editor’s Note: Today’s New Year’s Day editorial is a lightly edited and update reprise of our message on Jan. 2, 2022.

In your celebration of the new year, are you a bit like us in that at some point it crossed your mind how quickly 2024 flew by?

That as odd as the year was, as stressful and demanding as it sometimes felt, it seemed like somehow December got here before you’d wiped the 2023 New Year’s Eve sleep from your eyes?

OK, let go of 2024 for a moment

Remember the turn of the century? Just how amazing it had been to cross over from 1999 to 2000? If you’ve got enough years on you to remember that Y2K moment, you probably also had enough years back then where that benchmark felt surreal. One of those I-can’t-believe-this-is-really-happening moments we encounter from time to time. You may have exclaimed to friends or family, “The year 2000! Can you believe it?”

Well, you know what? That was a full quarter-century ago.

Twenty-five years!

“Life moves pretty fast,” as Ferris said. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

By the way, Ferris Bueller? Thirty-eight years ago. Thirty-eight!

Yes, yes, Ferris was prescient.

The ‘20s. Contemplate that for a moment. Seems strange that we’re already deep into the ‘20s , that Bush is painting and Obama’s hair is gray. That another presidential campaign has ended and a new administration is about to get under way.

Where did the decades go?

Anyone? Anyone?

As Dr. Seuss said, “How did it get so late so soon?”

Remember what you used to think of the old Roaring ‘20s?

Oh, that was distant. Before our times. Way before our times. Ancient. The stuff of sepia photos back when no one had their picture taken without dressing up for the occasion, when no one smiled for the camera, when a picture was reserved for a wedding or some other special event.

The stuff we call “vintage.”

Someday, people will look back at the 2020s, and we will be vintage too.

But at least we smile for the devices. A lot. Now if we can only learn to keep the light poles from popping out of our heads in the images.

Japanese author Haruki Murakami wrote, “Unfortunately, the clock is ticking. The hours are going by. The past increases. The future recedes. Possibilities decreasing, regrets mounting.”

The point is not to mourn mistakes or to wail against time.

The point is to remind ourselves what we already know: That our lives are limited. No matter how old or how young we are, no matter how long or short the time we’re given, we at some point exhaust the hours.

So don’t waste those hours in regrets or in worry. Instead, decide. What do you want to do with them?

Then do it.

Experience your life, whatever you have of it. And savor it.

“Yesterday is gone,” Mother Teresa said. “Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.”

At long last, 2024 is here. Let’s rejoice, as the psalmist said, and be glad in it, no matter how quickly it, too, passes into history.