Because every silver lining has its cloud

Spring Festival is almost upon us, offering everyone the opportunity to reflect and make plans for the coming 12 months.

It’s supposed to be a cathartic exercise. Yet when considering the year just gone, one truth seems to have been almost universally acknowledged about Earth’s most recent passage around the sun: It was, in the eyes of much of the Western media at least, one of the worst years in living memory.

From the roll call of celebrity deaths to the inexplicable success of Donald Trump, or the terrorist attacks and ongoing migrant crisis that have led to a newly fractured Europe, it certainly doesn’t seem to be the dawning of a brave new world.

But for some, 2016 will have been their best year. I am sure of it.

China, for instance, chalked up notable successes. Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang province, hosted the G20 Leaders Summit. The country’s astronauts conducted their longest space mission to date. Prosperity was evident in the billions spent as part of the world’s biggest one-day shopping spree on Singles Day and a record number of Chinese went on holiday abroad.

So the year wasn’t terrible for all, not by a long stroke, and I can say that with some confidence because one of my best years came in 2008, officially designated the International Year of the Potato by the United Nations.

I hasten to add here, my fondness for 2008 has very little do to with its official designation, and neither was it a year of many particularly memorable personal “firsts”. By that point in my life I’d already experienced much: Picked up the scars that will never heal, gone through my first heartbreak and realized certain truths about the world and myself that would stick with me forever.

But 2008 was the year that, in many respects, made me a man.

It wasn’t like that for everyone though. Indeed, in some ways that year heralded the dawning of a new era we’ve found ourselves picking up the pieces of ever since.

Fueled by the US subprime mortgage fiasco that preceded it, 2008 saw the arrival of the Great Recession and the beginnings of the global financial crisis, whose aftereffects are still reverberating around the world to this day — and will be felt for quite some time yet.

But amid all the chaos, as everything was falling apart, I wasn’t concerning myself too much with politics, or what the impending financial meltdown might mean for me.

I was somewhere else, doing something completely different.

And that’s the way that 2016 will probably seem for many, with time. At worst, it will be a bad memory, while for some, it might just have been the best of their years.

For now, let’s look ahead to a better 2017. And let me wish you all a happy and successful Year of the Rooster.