Jon Morgan

A New Year began, so I wanted a quick and easy New Year’s post, suitable for a snappy beginning to 2025. Clearly, since it’s now the end of January, this didn’t happen. I made a start on this post, sure, then got busy actually living life rather than writing about it.

Better late than never, though: Here are some new year’s thoughts, and a selection of photos from the first 1% of the year. Or at least, the first four days.

Why 1%?

I read a lot of e-books, and listen to a lot of audiobooks. In both of those, progress is often measured in percentages. For example:
I’m 10% of the way through now.
Now it’s at 53% - more than halfway!
We’re into the 90s - really enjoying this book, but am I ready for it to finish?

When I think about it, though, I realise that 1% of a book is actually pretty small. Even if it’s, say, a 500 page book, 1% is only 5 pages. And even if it’s a 20 hour audiobook, 1% is only 12 minutes. Sure, there are some books longer than those, but I’d say most are shorter, so the 1% mark is correspondingly shorter.

The same can be true of years. We tend to think of a year as a fairly long period of time (after all, a lot can happen in a year!) And yet, like a book is made up of many pages, a year is made up of many days. And when we think about how long 1% of a year is - it’s less than four days. Not long at all…

I think this is particularly clear at the changing of the years. In December I can easily have the 90% thoughts (“am I really ready for this year to be over?”), while in January there’s the expectation that the new year is a blank slate where I should be making grand plans and fixing everything I see wrong with myself.

I don’t think this makes sense: I don’t end my life on December 31, and I’m not reborn on January 1. Perhaps I’ve done some new things this month, but really January has meant tying up some of the loose ends left at the end of December, and doing the kind of summer activities that would have fit the Jon of 2024 and 2023 just as well as the current 2025 model.

At my stage of life, a new year isn’t like starting a new book from an author I’ve never read with all new characters and situations. It’s more like picking up the 20th or 30th book in a long running series. By that point, we mostly know what to expect from the protagonist and their fellow characters. Yes, they can still do things that they’ve never done before and perhaps completely surprise us, but in one book they’re unlikely to reinvent themselves or completely shake off the past that has built up over the last twenty books.

I do plan things for 2025 I’ve never done before, and hopefully those plans work out. I’ll probably also change in other ways during the year, ways which I haven’t yet imagined. But I don’t think completely changing who I am and how I live - developed and honed over many years - is either realistic or desirable.

Getting things done - while still appreciating the year

Thinking about 1% of the year reminds me how easy it can be to let things drift (this blog post can testify to that!). As the days pass, I tell myself that I didn’t feel like working on anything this day, and I was busy doing something else the other day. Far too quickly a day becomes a week, and a week becomes a month, and I’m once more feeling like I never get anything done.

But my message from that isn’t “seize every day” (even though I sometimes think it…). I actually take two main messages from it:

1. Like any year, I’m sure when I look back on 2025, there will be specific things that stand out. Perhaps they’ll be special achievements, or perhaps they’ll be things I did that were out of the ordinary for me. And perhaps they’ll also be unexpected disasters.

   But to get the things done I want to, at some point they will have to change from the year-as-a-blank-slate “I should do that sometime this year” to “I’m going to do that this month / this week / today”. Depending on what the thing is, maybe that time will be at the 2% point in the year, maybe it will be at the 30% point, or maybe it will be set up for a perfect 87% denouement, with only the resolution left to come (and the Christmas break, of course…). Or perhaps one of those points will see me starting an ongoing commitment, on its way to becoming embedded as a new habit.

   Some of these things will require a lot of planning in advance, and if I leave them to happen when the time is perfect, I’ll get to the end of the year and find that they haven’t happened.

   And so this part of the message is the message of intentionality.

2. 2025 will contain a lot of days - perhaps weeks and months - that don’t stand out in that way, but are still good days. It will also probably contain quite a few days that suck - but still have good moments. I don’t want to be so focused on the master plan for the year or on the things that go wrong that I miss the moments that went right.

   Over the year, there will be a lot of work done, and a lot of weekends taken. There will be satisfying walks, interesting animal encounters, and special photos. I’ll probably eat a variety of food, read or listen to many books, watch many films, visit many museums, and attend many plays and concerts.

   This part of the message is the message of appreciating the small things: Not every day has to be the most amazing day in 2025.

Basically, thinking about the year in percentages makes me want to use the days in 2025 well, but not get too worried if things don’t work out perfectly or if I don’t achieve everything I hoped.

Introducing the first 1%

This post was intended to focus on the second category above. To share some photos and experiences from a few days that were normal (or at least normal for me!). Days that didn’t signal the start of an amazing new model Jon Morgan 2025, but a continuation of the person I was happy enough being in 2024, 2023, …

In those first four days, there was a public holiday (that was New Year’s Day), a day working from home (let’s call it “Thursday”), a day working from the office (that would be “Friday”), and the start of a weekend (often known as “Saturday”). I watched an echidna, admired a variety of birds, and saw a sunrise and a few sunsets. I did a lot of walking, took a lot of photos, and started thinking about sharing some of those photos.

Day 1: An echidna and the first sunset

I was meant to be getting up to see the first sunrise of the year, same as I have previous years. But since I only got to bed a few hours before sunrise, this time I couldn’t make it. Not to worry - instead, I took an evening walk in my beloved Dandenong Ranges.

There were fairy wrens dancing about:

An echidna rooting about for ants:

As usual, it didn’t particularly care about keeping quiet or remaining hidden…

There was a tree that looked a bit menacing (is this a sign for the year?)

And then I saw the first sunset for the year:

Much easier to be awake for!

Day 2: The writing on the pavement

I guess a lot of the next day was just trying to remember what on earth I’d been doing at work before the Christmas break. I went walking at lunch-time, and there wasn’t much that stood out about it. But I did see this message chalked on the footpath in a few different places:

Perhaps it’s someone’s New Year’s Resolution? (or perhaps they already have it under control and are just encouraging others!)

Day 3: A walk after work

Day 3 was just another day in the office (given we’ve been in that office for more than a decade, I don’t even want to think about how many days I’ve spent in it…).

However, the thing to remember about January here is that it’s the height of summer. The evenings are long (in fact, it has the latest sunsets in the year…), and the temperatures are often more pleasant in the evening than at mid-day. That means great opportunities for walking after work. On this day, I chose to walk a bike path near work that had once been a railway line in the glory days of steam.

There was a laughing kookaburra marking its territory and looking for worms:

The colourful flowers of a flame tree:

A mouse, seemingly not too worried by the bikes whizzing past:

A mural of one the trains that once plied the route (I said it was the era of steam…).

There was one of our chattering noisy miners, with its piercing eyes:

Then came the longest interruption. I’d been making good time, and wondering how far I’d get before darkness descended, when I got to a nice looking yellow-blossomed eucalypt.

The blossoms were at a good height for photography and a couple of rainbow lorikeets seemed really into them, so I stuck round. How many ways do you think a bird can contort itself and stretch out its beak to get the precious blossoms and nectar?

It wasn’t just lorikeets. Further up the tree, a noisy miner also got involved:

I was just about to tear myself away (probably for the third or fourth time…), when I saw one of the lorikeets chase away another smaller bird. It settled on a neighbouring eucalypt, so of course I had to investigate.

It was a type of bird I’d seen a few times but never got to looking it up. This time I did, and it seems it was another kind of lorikeet - this time a musk lorikeet:

Eventually, with sunset approaching, I managed to tear myself away and carried on, only stopping to note an important public service announcement:

Should you happen to visit Melbourne and use that particular bike path, you really wouldn’t want your bike to sink in just there, now would you?

In the gathering dark I saw a crescent moon and a stream of bats leaving our local colony. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough light to capture those properly - but one of our urban possums was more obliging:

Then on my way home came another public service announcement. Must have been extolling the virtue of stargazing:

(OK, maybe it’s specifically intended for that particular construction site, but I liked it).

Day 4: Sunrise on a warm day

I mentioned that I’d missed my traditional first sunrise of the year (three years counts as a tradition, right?). It was OK, though - the weekend was due to be in high thirties celsius, so I figured Saturday would be a good opportunity to return to where I started, see the sunrise, then get in a good walk before it warmed up.

Delaying the sunrise probably worked out for the best, really - there weren’t the crowds I’d encountered there New Year’s Day 2022, and given there’s a lot of work going on there, the overflow area I’d used back then was fenced off…

So here we are once more: Sunrise from Kalorama Lookout:

The trees were splashed with colour:

There was a yellow glow behind the hills:

And the rabbits frolicked carelessly:

There was a wallaby finishing off its nightly graze:

A rosella reveling in the early morning light:

And a door to somewhere (judging by the colours and decoration, probably to Christmases Past):

The track wound through the tree ferns:

As well as the spider webs:

As I got further downhill and the temperatures rose, I saw a lot more birds:

There were colourful flowers, too:

Bees got in the act:

Finally, I had a late breakfast, then returned to the lookout I started from. By that point it was considerably brighter and warmer, but just as beautiful:

The cockatoos were squawking, and I managed to catch one in flight:

Then I went home, hid from the heat, and watched some cricket, only emerging again to watch the evening clouds:

Perhaps by that point I was already out of the first 1%, but never mind…

What about the rest of January?

One of the things I said to myself early on (I think while watching that first sunset), was that I want to experience life, not just write about it. And I’ve certainly done that the rest of the month. Sure, I’d like to have written (and published!) more. But it won’t kill me.

In that time, I’ve been to a couple of plays. I’ve attended the Australian Open and a couple of cricket matches. I’ve been walking by the Yarra in the moonlight at 3AM. I’ve been through the largest residential building in Australia, patted a former race-horse, and high fived a giraffe.

I’ve watched birds and animals squabble and forage and generally live life. I’ve admired bees and butterflies on flowers. I’ve watched sunrises and sunsets and the changing of the moon through its different phases. And of course taken thousands of photos of all those things and many others.

In short, I’ve lived life in my own idiosyncratic manner, and found much to enjoy in it and little time left to write about it.

Looking forward to the rest of the year

Yesterday, I left work early to attend the first ever day/night Test match at the MCG (as well as the first Women’s Test there since the 1940s…). Tomorrow, I plan to do a coastal walk (hopefully not melting in the forecast heat!). Tonight, I planned something with siblings for March. I have some plans for the rest of February, and I imagine as the month goes on I’ll plan more events as well as having more unexpected encounters.

The same applies to the rest of the year. I hope (and plan) for this year to contain some some things that I look back and go “That was what really made 2025 memorable”. But I also hope for it to contain a lot of days that I can get to the end of and go “That was a good day”. That happened in the first 1% of the year, and I hope whatever challenges life throws my way it will be true through to the last 1%, and then into 2026.

Happy New Year!