Today is January 1, 2025, a new year has begun, and I’ve aged another year. No special celebrations, just brewed a cup of coffee, sat at my desk, thinking of writing something casually. I’m someone who lacks a sense of ceremony and is indifferent to all holidays. For me, all days are the same—good or bad alike, all meanings are human-assigned. 2025 is no different from every past year, with academic pressures, the joy of exploration, anxiety, and calm. Years have passed like this, days like slowly flowing water, occasionally rippling, but ultimately settling.
This year I’ll turn 25. 25 is a somewhat subtle number for me. At 15, 20 seemed to represent “adulthood,” maturity and independence, the answer to all problems. At 20, 25 represented my ideal self—a person who has found direction and is steadily moving forward. The sense of time at 25 is different from at 15 or 20. At 15, I had no concept of time, always feeling the future was far away, days were long, never thinking from a time perspective. At 20, I started having vague goals, but still felt time was inexhaustible, doing whatever I liked, however I wanted.
Just muddling along like this, bang, 25. Now I’ve reached the age I once aspired to, but find many things not as simple as imagined. It’s even similar to when I was 20, with no clear answers, even more confusion and uncertainty. Sometimes anxiety-inducing, sometimes liberating.
Honestly, I rarely view my life from a “time” perspective. In recent years, I’ve mostly gone with the flow. Each day’s time is divided into classes, experiments, writing, and entertainment, rarely stopping to think who I am, where I want to go. But precisely because of this, time has become blurred in my life; it’s no longer a countdown, no longer a target to chase, but a natural flow, like air—unperceivable yet omnipresent.
Standing at the start of the new year, I think perhaps I can try viewing time from another angle. It’s not a straight line, but a slowly expanding circle. As time passes, our experiences, knowledge, horizons are like boundaries extending on this circle. As a child, the world seemed simple because the circle was small, boundaries close. Now, having seen more landscapes, met more people, I know the world’s complexity and vastness. Each person’s boundaries differ, each circle has a unique shape, making me understand diversity better, and more willing to respect and accept.
This year I don’t want to make too many grand plans. Past experience tells me plans are easily disrupted by life’s accidents, causing loss of focus on the present. So for me in 2025, it’s more about maintaining awareness: seeing. Seeing myself, seeing others, seeing the world’s various possibilities. Maybe I’ll still be confused this year, but as long as I have new insights in this year’s time, clearer on who I am, what I want, that would be good.
So the new year does have meaning; through time I see my growth, the world’s complexity and diversity, increasingly clear on who I am, what I want, where I want to go. Meaning is what we assign to it, not inherent.
This is quite good.