Dear Future Matt,

The year 2022 arrived last night while I slept. We watched the five minutes surrounding midnight in New York, after playing games with friends over Zoom again, then headed to bed quickly. I let Polybius put me to sleep, and so I did not directly mark the arrival of this year.

While I would love to say I hope that this is the year where we stop worrying about covid, that wouldn't really be true. While it seems clear that covid will slowly but surely become an endemic disease like the flu, it's not clear to me what that will actually look like in practice, or what life will look like under endemic covid.

My hopes for this year are similar to those for last year, but perhaps with a bit more ambition. I hope we are able to visit restaurants again this year (as I write this we are in the midst of an Omicron wave that has our family starting to hunker down). I hope we can do some travel -- I am hoping we will see a 2022 All Hands.

I don't plan on setting any resolutions this year again. It still feels incredibly hard to plan. Yet, there are some things I hope can happen this year:

I'd love to get back to playing guitar. This will hopefully be a year where I return to guitar lessons.
I hope this year is a better one for physical fitness. While I got a fair number of good bike rides in during the summer, I'd love to get in better shape this year.

I hope this year is relatively free of disasters, both natural and human; it would be nice to have a calm year. A brief break from the roller-coaster of living through history?

There will invariably be changes afoot this year, I hope that we are able to cope with them with grace and balance. After years of living high stress, I'd love to feel relaxed again. Maybe this year?

-- Matt, January 1, 2022