January takes its name from Janus, the two-faced Roman god who simultaneously looks backward and forward in time and space (and left and right at crosswalks).

It tracks that Janus, the recent solstice, and the launch date of our New Year should generally converge at this point on the calendar. As a symbolic moment of reflection and projection—of what was and what can be—it’s perfect. That said, of the Roman gods, Bacchus tends to get the spotlight come Dec. 31. Some New Year’s celebrations are said to be bacchanalian, resulting in the god of wine and revelry getting blamed (or credited) for joyous excess and the ritual bonding that comes with holding someone’s hair as they worship another deity, the god of porcelain.

Janus, relatively sober by comparison (despite the fact that two mouths theoretically mean they could imbibe twice as much), simply surveys the scene with 20/20 hindsight and foresight. All they ask is that you look back without nostalgia and look forward without illusion.

I’m good at neither. Nostalgia is one of the banes of being middle-aged. Seventeenth-century doctors assumed nostalgia was a psychological disorder treatable with leeches. These days, it’s a quaint longing for what once was, eagerly leveraged by marketing professionals (also leeches). And my skill at prognosticating the future is best summed up by a line from a Shel Silverstein poem:

Backward Bill he rides like the wind
Don’t know where he’s going but sees where he’s been.

And yet—this coming year feels different. That’s the real gift of New Year’s Eve: a culture-wide hard reset. A collective pause at the threshold. A chance to notice the stories we keep telling ourselves about who we’ve been, revise them to who we are, and outline who we might become.

This isn’t a call for any self-help industrial complex bull but simply an invitation to do what Janus asks: to stand in the doorway, look clearly in both directions, and step—deliberately—in the direction of Next.

Happy New Year.