Year-End Retrospectives Have Value, If You Look Within

The Masai of East Africa do not celebrate birthdays. They do not look back at births, at deaths, at last year, at last week, at yesterday. In their culture, there is only now.

Our culture, for the past week, has been obsessed with the past year, with what was popular in 2014. What movies were blockbusters, what books were best sellers, what athletes and celebrities drew crowds, and who was born or died. All of this would make no sense to the Masai, whose yesterdays go uninspected.

I visited a Masai tribe in 2014 — flew to Tanzania and joined a group whose escort brought us to a village early one February morning. Mud-and-grass huts in a circle, huts so small you had to bend to enter them. A bed. A fire. Some pots and bowls and blankets. Dirt floors. Dirt everywhere, blowing, covering everything with a fine, grimy confectionary-sugar like dust.

No electricity. No running water. And yet the people were clean.

A mystery to me, this culture bereft of all the comforts we have, a culture that doesn't amass things, that doesn't look back to celebrate or grieve or assess, that works and eats and sleeps and enjoys.

I could never be a Masai because I love looking back, love especially this once-a-year hall pass that we get between Christmas and the first full week of the New Year where we are not just allowed to wallow in yesterday, but are actually encouraged.

Newspapers, news shows, websites, everywhere you look there are lists of the most-read books, the best ads, the biggest scandals. The top 10 of everything.

Read. Watch. Remember. Indulge. This is the message.

I keep a journal. I take a lot of pictures, too. I wouldn't remember my life without them.

And so I look through them one more time before this first week of 2015 begins. I look at pictures of birthdays and concerts and parties and celebrations that I had or went to but can barely remember. I look at my kids and their kids growing up, growing old so imperceptibly that in life I don't see. They haven't changed. No one has changed. That's what I think. And then I compare pictures taken last January and pictures taken last week and I see the changes.

In my journal I read, too, about Amos, a young Masai. He lives with his tribe. He counts his wealth by the number of cows he owns. But he goes to college and is majoring in hospitality and he speaks flawless English. And though he sleeps in a hut without water or electricity, he has a cellphone, which he charges at school. When is your birthday, Amos? I asked him. He didn't know. He was born in the rainy season. That's what his mother told him. Not knowing his birthdate will be a problem when he applies for a passport, he tells me.

Best films. Best songs. Best TV. Best theater. With a search on Google I can access all this information.

But what I've done for the last 365 days, I can't Google. And so I write down at least some of it.

I wonder, if it's so important to remember people we don't know, to mourn their deaths and celebrate their successes, isn't it at least equally important to mourn and celebrate our own lives, to take stock of what happened to us in 2014?

Best thing that happened to you this year? Worst thing. Favorite book. Nicest thing someone said. Or didn't say. Proudest accomplishment. Music you loved. Movies that moved you. Vacations taken. Friends visited. The top 10 lessons learned.

The Masai never look back. We do, every year, but we are spending far too much time looking back at the wrong things.