The Contradiction of a New Year

On made-up time and the feeling of leaving someone behind

It’s the first Monday of the New Year. It’s one of those beautiful, crisp days, where the full moon is still out shining brightly despite the blue sky on the school run. There’s frost lacing the ground, glittering in the low winter sunlight.

The world looks calm. Ordered. As though everything has reset itself overnight.

Yet it seems that everywhere you look another message is loud. People are pumped up, ready to smash 2026 in the face. Fresh starts, big goals, shiny calendars, endless potential. And here you are, maybe feeling… nothing. Or worse, maybe half of you wants to charge forward while the other half feels frozen, unable to move, unable to stop looking back.

There is something profoundly contradictory about a new year when you’re grieving.

Your mind tells you it’s just a made-up date, created by someone, somewhere, in a world that insists on structure. Nothing is going to miraculously change overnight. Your heart, however, tells you that you’re standing at the edge of a cliff; that you are stepping into something they will never be part of. That, somehow, you are leaving them behind.

Grief doesn’t care about calendars. And yet, somehow, it notices every tick of the clock, every turn of the page. The calendar flips from December 31st to January 1st, and you feel like you’ve crossed a threshold you never asked to approach. You carry a million memories, a million moments, and yet the world wants you to march forward as if nothing happened.

With grief, as with life, we can feel joy and sorrow at the same time. We can move forward but not move on. These two truths can coexist. Forward motion and standing still. Collective celebration and private grief. Arbitrary time and very real feelings. You can sip champagne while tears land on your sequinned dress. You can smile at your child’s laughter while remembering someone who isn’t there to see it.

Time is an invention. We measure it with calendars, clocks, milestones - but grief has its own rhythm. Grief does not care whether it is January or July. It exists outside the human-constructed timelines we rely on to feel safe or productive. And yet, somehow, we feel it. We feel the pressure of the dates. We feel the weight of anniversaries, birthdays, holidays. We feel the subtle pull of every year’s start - a reminder that life keeps moving, whether we want it to or not.

Standing at the threshold of a new year, grief whispers that moving forward means leaving them behind. It is a cruel trick of perception, because we never leave them behind. They are in every heartbeat, every memory, every moment of reflection. And yet, the fear lingers: what if moving forward is a betrayal? What if taking another step without them is forgetting?

Sometimes it is the little things that bring this contradiction into sharp focus: a fleeting scent in the kitchen, the empty side of a bed, a street you used to walk together. These moments feel sharper at the start of a new year because they are juxtaposed against a collective sense of hope, of expectation. Everyone else seems ready to begin anew, while you feel suspended between past and future.

And here lies the dichotomy: wanting a fresh start but not wanting one at all. Wishing for change, while also wishing the world would simply pause long enough for you to catch your breath. Hoping for a spark of joy, but afraid that feeling happiness will somehow diminish the depth of your sorrow.

Grief teaches us that life is not linear. It teaches us that joy and pain, hope and despair, can live side by side, without diminishing one another. You can laugh today and cry tomorrow. You can feel peace in one moment and chaos in the next. The calendar does not dictate your emotional reality, but the calendar does provide a lens through which you measure it.

Maybe that’s the contradiction itself: the tension between the arbitrary structures of time and the very real feelings that exist inside them. We want January 1st to mean something, to be a marker of progress, of healing, of renewal. But healing does not obey a calendar. Neither does grief. Both unfold in their own way, at their own pace, and both can exist simultaneously in the same heartbeat.

So, if you are standing at the edge of a new year, know that it’s ok to feel the contradiction. It’s ok to move slowly, or not at all. It’s ok to celebrate in tiny ways, and to mourn in private. It is okay to hold onto them and, at the same time, let yourself take one small step forward.

Being human is, perhaps, learning to hold contradictions with grace. To accept that you can carry your grief into the new year without it defining every moment. To acknowledge that they travel with you in ways that matter far more than a calendar allows.

So here’s your permission slip for the first full week of the year, and for every day to come:

· Permission to feel joy and sorrow at the same time.

· Permission to want a fresh start and resist it.

· Permission to move forward at your own pace, even if it feels slow (by the way - there’s no such thing!)

· Permission to honour those you carry with you, without guilt, without apology.

Time may be made up. Calendars may be arbitrary. But your feelings are not. And in holding all of them - the contradictions, the heaviness, the sparkles of light - you are, quite simply, alive.

And sometimes, that is all you need to be.