Happy 2026

'Tis a new dawn. 'Tis a new day.

Time is funny business. Some say it is an arrow that moves only forward. Some say that it is a wheel. A cycle of what goes around that comes around. If you subscribe to the idea of linear time, then I suppose new years and birthdays are useful markers, junctions at which to pause before picking up the knapsack and trudging on.

I will turn 58 years old in 2026. I can’t say it feels any different from 2025 or the year before that, and yet I can sense that the arrow of time has shot just a little further ahead from a year ago. Time is funny business. In the early years, you’re hardly aware of it stalking you. I can’t remember paying attention to time until maybe the tenth grade when I had my own watch. The HMT device, which was oversized for my wrist, was gifted to me so I could keep track of the hours during exams that were designed as much for time management as they were to test your knowledge of hydrocarbons. Prior to that, it was always someone else’s task, usually appa’s or amma’s, to keep us on schedule, whether to catch the train and get to school.

Inevitably, time became part of the daily vocabulary. There was today, tomorrow, the short term, the long term, the temporary and the permanent, the past and the future, and so on. A lot of time has been spent on filling it up with places to go and things to do. On titles to get, bank accounts to fill and experiences to savor. Waking up one fine day like the new year’s day or a birthday, it feels like time, once a loyal companion in my quest to keep pace with it, is passing me by. I am now squarely in what they call middle age.

Middle age isn’t what it used to be. Back in the day, forty was the marker for midlife, but now, finding consensus on when middle age begins and what it represents isn’t easy. A dictionary would define it as “the period in your life when you are no longer young but have not yet become old”. A 2018 survey reported that most Americans aged between 40 and 64 considered themselves middle-aged, but so did 44% of people aged between 65 and 70.

People magazine cheekily reported that the characters in ‘And Just Like That,’ the rebooted series of Sex and the City, were the same age (about 55) as the Golden Girls when they made their first outing in the mid-80s. How can that be possible? My recollection of the sequined Florida housemates was that they were teetering off their mortal coils, but then everyone seems old when you are young.

Middle age once had a purpose of sorts. It was a time that offered the stability and continuity that used to come from having a job for life. Now, it’s not just your employment that might feel precarious, but your job function or industry itself. It used to be a time when you slowed down to enjoy life. A time to take stock. Now, it reflects that you’ve still got life left in you to embrace a last hurrah. “Hold my beer while I go off on this one last jamboree.” Some feel pressured to lose pounds and reinvent themselves, to look fantastic, to not slow down or age gracefully. You can’t just be gray anymore. You’ve got to be glamorous, right?

In the past, the male midlife crisis had a well-trodden path riddled with cliches, from the red sports car to the trophy wife. These days, middle age seems to be associated more with anxiety, angst, and the search for meaning than with the quest for leather trousers. And therein lies the problem with all our “age is just a number” mental gymnastics. Dispensing with middle age is comforting because if we never own up to being in the middle, we will never have to contemplate the end. Until we are forced to, that is.

As I look ahead from the vantage point of a man about to turn 58, it strikes me that life in many ways is yet to begin. Sure, it has been filled with experiences of all sorts till date, enough to fill a phone with 10s of 1000s of images. Yet, what lies ahead promises to be richer, and more profound than anything I’ve seen before. Even as I ponder my mortality, I am forced to reckon with that of those who are dearest to me, friends and family alike. Children have grown up, finished college, and begun working. They will meet exciting new people, have their hearts broken, and have it healed, pay credit card bills and save for a down payment for a house, and marry and have kids and so on. As for me, there will be jobs to walk away from, new purposes to embrace, and there will be the inevitable march towards irrelevance and discovering a new kind of relevance. This movie is not done yet. The stuff that life is really made of is yet to unfold.

It’s not that life has been trite or wasted till now. There has been some wisdom gathered along the way. Perhaps, middle age is that part of life when you are not naive but are not wholly wise either. A lot, it seems, depends on where we go from here. The future promises to be filled with gravitas laden experiences but experience does not always lead to wisdom. It could, instead, easily result in a sullen retreat from life itself. What are we supposed to learn? That the world is changing and we must adapt with it, so we may not let our children down as they teach themselves to live in it? That we must learn to gracefully step aside so others can take our places? That nothing really lasts forever?

Perhaps it’s all of it. Perhaps it’s none of it. Time, as they say, will tell. No one ever can analyze their way into wisdom. We can only think ourselves out of foolishness. Some things cannot be taught. But they can be learned.

If the entire history of Earth were to be compressed into just ONE day, single celled life appears at 4am. Fish begin swimming in the oceans at 8pm. The dinosaurs appear at 10:40pm and go extinct an hour later by 11:40pm. Our first human ancestors appeared at 11:58pm. Modern humans appeared at 11:59:58. Ancient Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Persian and Indian civilizations, the Torah, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada, the Bible and the Koran, the Enlightenment Age and the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the Moon Landing, the Internet, iPhones and social media, and Artificial Intelligence, and all of that - all of which considered markers of human progress - appeared in the last few seconds. You and I have been on this planet for a blink of an eye. It’s hard to take ourselves seriously, and yet we seek a purpose.

This world we live in was never meant to give us purpose. It can only give us reasons to do something or another. We can make money. We can create art. Or, we can do something that we love more than money or art. Once we’re done with all of that, what’s left but the taming of the body and the mind? We learn that the world has nothing left to offer us. And, we become free. The only reason to grow old is so we can finally set ourselves free. What is there to be gained by merely growing weaker if we become none the wiser? It is far better to die young. So much of the world changes and yet nothing about the human condition changes and very little will. In the immortal words of Adele, “they say that time’s supposed to heal ya, but I ain’t done much healing.”

Here’s to healing and growing, and laughing and losing ourselves, and weeping and finding ourselves, in this new year where the Earth begins yet another journey around the Sun. A lot can happen in a blink of an eye.

I have a lot more to say but this has already turned out longer than I wanted.

Happy 2026. Have yourselves a wonderful new year. ‘Tis a new dawn, and ‘tis a new day.