Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

There’s an old saying about “starting off on the right foot” when you talk about beginnings.

You may hope to “start off on the right foot” when meeting someone new. As in you hope things go well when you first say hello.

You may describe the first day of a new job as “not starting off on the right foot” because things weren’t quite what you expected.

Beginnings, of course, don’t usually have much to do with actual feet. But you can imagine that people often need to use their feet to take that first step forward in something new. And if things quickly go wrong, the person may feel off-kilter, similar to how it feels to lose your balance by stepping forward with the “wrong foot first.”

Everything has a beginning (regardless of which foot you use to get there).

As a writer, I think a lot about the beginning of stories. I remember some of the advice in my college writing class was to find the most exciting part of your story and then make that the beginning. Cut all the boring bits before it because you don’t need them. You really want something that hooks your reader immediately, so they want to keep turning the page instead of putting the book down.

(This is easier said than done sometimes. I know from experience.)

Think about the last action movie you might have watched. It’s not uncommon to start the story with a fight scene – something that will get the audience to pause and think “hey, what’s going on here? I want to know more.”

Some writers will even start their story “in media res” which is a fun Latin phrase which basically means starting off in the middle of the plot. After that exciting hook, the story often will jump back to an earlier point and the audience can then have fun trying to figure out how things lead to that opening scene.

I suppose part of the fun of writing fiction is that you can make any point the beginning of your story if you try hard enough.

Now that it’s January, plenty of people are thinking about the beginning of a new year. 2025 marks a quarter into this century now. (Can you believe that? Feels like we just started this decade a month ago. I blame the pandemic a little on warping our sense of time.)

A year can be kind of an arbitrary sense of measurement though.

January marks the beginning of a new “calendar” year. Toss out those old calendars and hang up a new one on your fridge. (I hope y’all got a copy of our 2025 calendar inserted into the paper a few weeks ago. It features a lot of lovely local photos by local photographers.)

For local government and many businesses, however, the new fiscal year doesn’t start until July. You’ve still got six months to go until that year is over! Plenty of time to fret over budget planning until then.

For students from pre-school age all the way through college, the school year begins annually in August. And that doesn’t even cover a full calendar year, since everyone gets a two-month summer break between “years.”

And schools around the world don’t always start at the same time we do. Japanese kids kick off their school year in April, and Korean kids go back a month earlier, in March. Australian kids begin in January… which is actually the middle of the summer for them.

For local farmers, a new year of work kicks off in the springtime. They’ve got to get the fields ready and start planting. Then the crops grow throughout the year until they’re ready to be harvested in the fall. After that, there’s a little bit of downtime in the winter as they clean up equipment and such, getting ready to do it all over again the next spring.

There are varieties of plants which can be sown and grown at other times of the year, but the spring-to-fall cycle is pretty common here at least.

And for every single person in the world, they mark each new year of their life with a birthday. And unless your birthday is on January 1, that year of life isn’t going to line up perfectly with the calendar on our refrigerators.

So the beginning of a new calendar year can often bring with it the weight of all sorts of expectations, like the temptation to come up with some “new year resolutions” to make some changes and improvements to ourselves. But when people then fall short of those goals, they tend to say “well, maybe next year.”

But, as you can see, the beginning of a year can happen any time, depending on what it involves!

Accidentally botch your new year’s resolution to exercise every day or eat healthier food or anything else along those lines? No problem! Start your year over again the next week or month instead. No one’s going to suddenly appear in your living room to tell you that you can’t simply begin again!

As I said earlier, everything has a beginning. And that beginning can be different for everyone. I hope 2025 is a good year for all of us, no matter whether you start it right-footed or wrong-footed.

Holly Taylor is a Staff Writer for Roanoke-Chowan Publications. Contact her at holly.taylor@r-cnews.com or 252-332-7206.