Better

I generally contend that 1987 was my favorite year:

I got married, came this close to publishing my first novel, wrote most of an unpublished second, spent seven months living in Paris and the south of France with my blushing bride, and basically got to live out most of the dreams I had about life at that time.

I usually consider 1997 a close second:

I became a father, bought a house, finished my Master’s Degree in Philosophy, co-wrote a second self-help book with my friend and co-author Richard Leider, started doing yoga pretty seriously, and basically took the important foundational steps to becoming the version of an adult that I am today.

I’m putting 2011 right up there, though:

I travelled to India to study yoga for two and a half months, wrote a soon-to-be-published book on doing Philosophy with young pre-college students, co-rewrote the third edition of Repacking Your Bags, the book Richard Leider and I wrote that has sold something like 300,000 copies worldwide, survived the 13th year of my daughter’s life, rode my bike at least 7000 miles, sold five Haulin’ Colin trailers, managed to bend myself into Marichasna D with almost daily regularity and in general, got to do everything I wanted most of the time.

Lots of people claim—and many with ample justification—that things are getting worse in the world year after year. That may be—and certainly is from an environmental standpoint, for instance—but in my little life, at least, the possibility of improvement still exists.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever have a year to top ’87 and I can’t see ’97 falling out of second place, but if these past 365 days are any gauge, it’s not impossible that there will be other times upon which I can look back as fondly as I do these.

Here I am, getting nostalgic for the present; how odd. I can see shedding tears for auld lang syne, but new?