May the coming year be kind
As this year comes to a close, I find myself thinking less about resolutions and more about time. How quietly it moves, and how quickly it seems to add up. New Year’s Eve has a way of doing that. It shows up with celebrations and confetti, but underneath all of it is a truth that’s harder to ignore: another year has passed.
For the first time since becoming a parent, the year ahead will no longer be the year my first child was born. That feels like a line being crossed, even if nothing about our day-to-day life will look dramatically different when the calendar turns. Still, something about that realization lingers. For so long, our time has been measured in “firsts.”
First holidays. First tooth. First sleepless nights and first smiles. Now we’re stepping into a season where those firsts begin to stack behind us, and something new takes their place.
It’s a reminder that time does not slow down for anyone.
Every New Year’s Eve, we’re encouraged to celebrate, counting down the final seconds, popping confetti cannons, toasting to what’s next, and there’s joy in that. There should be! But New Year’s Eve is also a marker. It’s a quiet acknowledgment that another set of days has slipped by. And before you know it, those days pile up. One year becomes several. More years pass than you ever meant to let go unnoticed.
As a parent, that awareness feels sharper. Time doesn’t just move, it grows. Babies become toddlers. Toddlers become kids. The moments you assume will always be there slowly change shape. You don’t always realize when something becomes “the last time.” It happens gently, without ceremony, while you’re busy living your life.
That same truth exists beyond our homes, too. In our neighborhoods, our schools, our churches, and our workplaces, time keeps moving. The people around us are changing right alongside us. Seasons come and go. Needs rise and fall. And sometimes we don’t realize how much time has passed until we stop long enough to look around.
That’s why I hope we enter the coming year with a little more intention.
Time with the people we love is not something to save for special occasions.
It is the point.
The whole, entire, point.
It’s the ordinary days that matter most. The ones without milestones or announcements. The evenings spent together. The conversations that wander. The routines that feel mundane until one day they’re gone.
That includes family gathered around a table, but it also includes the quiet ways we show up for one another. Checking on a neighbor. Sitting with a friend who’s had a hard week. Making space for someone who needs help carrying their load. Community isn’t built in grand gestures, it’s built in time willingly given.
It’s seeing your neighbor build a swing set in his backyard at 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and waking up early just to hear how excited the girls get when they see what Santa brought them.
It can be as simple as letting someone in front of you in traffic.
Every minute is a gift, even the hard ones. And gifts aren’t meant to be wasted.
The coming year doesn’t need to be perfect. It doesn’t need us to have everything figured out. What it needs is presence. It needs us to notice when time is asking for our attention, to choose connection over distraction, and patience over rushing through the days. To care not only for our own families, but for the people around us who help make life feel a little less heavy.
As parents, we often wish time would slow down, even as we count the days until the next milestone. It’s a strange contradiction, sitting on the edge of our seat, waiting and wanting our children to grow while also wishing they wouldn’t grow so fast and time would stop being a thief. But maybe the answer isn’t slowing time at all. Maybe it’s learning to live fully inside it, and teaching our children what it looks like to care for others by the way we live our own lives. The future will arrive whether we’re ready or not. All we can do is meet it with care.
So as the calendar turns, my hope for the year ahead is simple.
May it be kind.
Kind in the way that allows us to savor small moments. Kind in the way that reminds us to show up for one another. Kind enough to give us the clarity to see how precious our time really is, both at home and in the community we share.
One day, we’ll look back and realize how much life was happening in these years. I hope we can say we didn’t rush through it. That we cherished the time we were given. That we cared for one another well. That we understood, at least in part, that every second was something worth holding onto.
Be kind to your neighbors, Behind to your pets, May the coming year be kind.