Year Gone Tripping

There’s a particular mood that shows up around Christmas and the end of the year. Time loosens a little. Days blur. Old memories surface without asking permission. Songs you haven’t heard in years suddenly feel closer than the ones you’ve been playing on repeat all month. It’s not quite nostalgia, and it’s not exactly reflection either. It’s more like stumbling back into yourself.

Which illuminates our strange relationship with time, something discussed by the writer Marcel Proust. Proust is often treated as the great writer of memory and time, but who we could also see as a writer of joy. Not joy as empty optimism or cheerfulness, but joy as a way of being alive. Joy as a discipline of sensitivity.

The way Proust describes happiness is almost like the feeling that you are an instrument. That there is a certain tuning of the strings within you such that even the slightest sensation can create music. The world touches you and something resonates. What makes this idea powerful is that it refuses the modern suspicion of sensitivity as weakness. For Proust, sensitivity is not fragility. It is a capacity that has to be cultivated. To live richly is to be affected.

This is where his idea of the “inner book” comes in. The inner book isn’t a diary or a body of work. It’s the accumulation of impressions that settle into you without being fully understood at the time. Your body, your attention, your lived experience are already recording something. You don’t need to produce anything for it to count. Living itself is the inscription.

That idea feels especially resonant at the end of a year, when we’re tempted to turn our lives into bullet points. Achievements, failures, lessons learned, inspirational quotes on social media and carefully curated Instagram dumps. But the inner book doesn’t work like that. It’s not organised. It doesn’t announce itself. It’s written in fragments, sensations and half-formed thoughts and meanings that wake you up at 3am when you’d rather be zzz-ing your life away. A conversation that stayed with you for days or a moment that stopped you in your tracks for reasons you couldn’t quite explain.

These moments are like stumbling blocks. Pavement stones that trip you as you walk. You’re moving along, absorbed in routine, then something knocks you off course. It could be a smell, a voice note or bumping into someone you haven’t seen in a long time. Suddenly the world feels thicker, stranger, more tangible and more demanding of your attention.

Proust, for example, was deeply suspicious of the idea that beauty is simply something you recognise on cue. The sunset, cathedral, perfect view or piece of art. To simply say “this is beautiful” because it conforms to an established category misses something essential. Beauty happens when something resists classification. When it arrives unexpectedly and when it interrupts you.

Love works the same way. Someone goes from a complete stranger to someone you can’t imagine a life without. A dog is just a dog until it is your dog. One song can be something entirely banal to one person and to someone else its saturated with meaning and to someone else again it might make them want to scream out in pain and hurl the bluetooth speaker into an ocean. These are ordinary objects that suddenly carry entire stories of our life inside them.

Because a true experience doesn’t just add information, it changes the conditions under which you live. After it, you cannot quite go back to the way things were before.

This is what Proust means when he says that such moments allow us to “regain reality”. Not observe it from a distance, but enter into it. The external world meets something internal and unspoken, and the two transubstantiate. Contingency meets necessity. What happens to you feels both accidental and inevitable. Once it has occurred it feels as if it was always destined to happen and the past is recontextualised to lead to that moment as if it was fated.

Time is doing something strange here too. We usually think about time at the end of the year in terms of scarcity. Another year gone. Another reminder of finitude. But Proust suggests something almost opposite. A finite life, properly lived, feels infinite. Not because it goes on forever, but because its moments recur, deepen, echo.

A meal shared with someone you love doesn’t feel like it disappears when it ends. It settles somewhere in you. The same with conversations, with books, with music, with moments of sudden clarity or sudden doubt. They don’t pass through time so much as they lodge themselves inside it.

This is why the end of the year can feel emotionally dense without being dramatic. You’re not just looking back at events. You’re encountering the objects in which your year hid itself. The things that stopped you. The moments that demanded interpretation. The stumbling stones you didn’t realise were shaping you at the time are all resurfacing from somewhere within you forcing you to stumble through the infinite again.

Christmas, at its best, creates the conditions for this kind of encounter. Not because it’s cheerful, but because it interrupts productivity. It insists on useless time. Time that cannot be optimised. Time that allows impressions to surface.

Maybe the task isn’t to ask whether the year was good or bad, successful or wasted. Maybe it’s to ask where you were surprised. Where something reached you from the outside and felt like it came from within. Where time thickened instead of passing cleanly.

Those moments are already written. You don’t need to summarise them. You only need to let yourself read them.