You seldom know when it’s the last time you will ever see someone dear. Even rarer is understanding, the moment you first meet someone, whether they will become important in your life.
At the beginning of each year, I promise myself I will note down each time I’m introduced to new people and each time I see/talk with friends that I don’t see every day (no need to track colleagues). Then, like with most New Year’s resolutions, I don’t follow through with it.
So I don’t have hard data to discuss my 2024 for what concerns people.
Dramatic as it has been on the global scale, 2024 has been in many ways a quiet year on a personal level, as people around me had to re-adjust to various life changes, causing fewer dinners and drinks with friends than usual, but also more frequent lunches and breakfasts with a couple of closest ones.
I was very blessed with the opportunity to celebrate an important birthday twice, once for each main group of friends - some of whom had to travel to be there.
As a certain wingless angel wrote, no man is a failure who has friends.
I lost touch with a couple of people I had a good relationship with, but hey, forget it, Jake, it’s Brussels. People know when they arrive, they don’t know when they’ll leave. And many of them will leave.
But, also, the year has introduced a few new people have appeared, whom I would be very sorry to lose any time soon.
This is all ‘IRL’.
Online, on one side I expanded the number of people I follow, both through their web pages and on Mastodon (and BlueSky). On the other side, I was glad to find out about the IndieWeb Carnival, in which I started taking part in June, and the IndieWeb Movie Club, which I joined in September.
Thanks to both initiatives, I have re-discovered the pleasure of the ‘people’s web’, and I have had the opportunity to exchange a few messages and emails with some new online friends.
So, let me raise a virtual glass to my people of the year for 2024. I won’t embarrass you by naming you explicitly, but you know who you are.