Listening for the Click: A Safe-Cracker’s Guide to December 31st

Look — and I mean REALLY look — at your calendar right now1. December 31st, 2024. The temporal equivalent of that moment when you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you locked your front door, so you spend the entire shopping trip constructing increasingly elaborate scenarios about how your cats have learned to operate the doorknob and are now hosting some kind of feline fight club in your living room.

What is it about December 31st? It's simultaneously the most and least significant day of the year, a temporal safe whose combination we pretend to understand but actually just keep guessing at, year after year after year2. Each attempt at this annual ritual feels like we're getting closer, but maybe we're just convincing ourselves that all this back-and-forth means progress.

Picture yourself standing before a vault—not the gleaming Hollywood kind, with precision dials and improbably attractive thieves, but a scuffed, dented thing with a smell you can't quite place but could swear reminds you of your uncle's basement, where the spinning of the dial feels less like progress and more like the author's clumsiest metaphor for the ways we pretend to 'manage' our lives3. You're spinning the dial: three turns right to 15, two turns left past 27, one turn right to 42. Then you hear it – that subtle click that might mean success or might just be the sound of another failed attempt. So you start again: right, left, right. Or was it left, right, left? Each attempt feels like you're both closer and further from the answer. And all you remember are all those resolutions you made last year while slightly buzzed on discount champagne and the kind of optimism that only shows up when you're wearing a paper hat with "2024" written on it in glitter.

The Paradox of Smart People Doing Nothing (While Pretending to Do Everything)

Here's a truth about smart people and their New Year's resolutions4: They're often the worst at opening their own safes. Why? Because they're too busy calculating the statistical probability of each possible combination, researching the history of safe-making, and writing detailed Reddit posts about the theoretical weaknesses in various locking mechanisms — all while never actually touching the dial.

You see them everywhere, especially during this weird week between Christmas and New Year's when time loses all meaning and you're not quite sure if it's Tuesday or Saturday or possibly February5: The brilliant programmer who spends six months designing the perfect productivity system but never starts the novel they've been talking about since college. The philosophy PhD who can quote Kierkegaard on the nature of anxiety but can't ask out the barista they've been pining over for weeks. The marketing genius who can dissect every Super Bowl commercial's psychological strategy but hasn't launched their own business because "the timing isn't quite right."6

The Safe-Cracker's Secret (Or: Why Time is Actually Just a Really Complicated Lock)

Here's what professional safe-crackers know — and what New Year's Eve makes mockingly obvious7 — progress isn't linear. You turn right to make progress, then left to undo it all, then right again to build on what you've learned. Each rotation builds upon the last, even when it feels like you're moving in the wrong direction. Sometimes you have to lose ground to gain ground. Sometimes you have to forget everything you think you know about the combination to finally hear what the lock is telling you.

Consider Phillips Brooks, a 19th-century Episcopal minister who probably never imagined his words about spiritual preparation would resonate with our modern cycle of Netflix binges and midnight doomscrolling. In his 1877 sermon "The Purpose and Use of Comfort," Brooks laid out this gutting observation about how our major life moments get decided in the quiet weeks we barely notice8. The weeks when nothing seems to happen, when we're just going through motions, when we're wondering whether to finally learn sourdough baking or take up competitive juggling — these are the weeks shaping who we'll be when the big moments arrive. These are the weeks when we're just turning the dial, not even realizing we're about to crack something open – or that we just did, and already turned past it.

The Art of Listening

The mastery isn't just in the turning – it's in the listening. Each click, each subtle resistance, each unexpected give in the mechanism is a form of communication9. And like any language, we often misinterpret the signals. You might think you're inputting the right combination, but if the safe isn't opening, you need to try a different approach. Maybe you're:

• Speaking the language of logic to someone who processes through emotion10
• Offering solutions when someone just needs to be heard
• Sticking to a script when the situation calls for improvisation
• Repeating yourself in louder, slower English to someone who speaks fluent Spanish
• Trying to teach calculus to a dog named Pickles and blaming Pickles when she doesn't learn

The Moments We Miss

Every turn of the dial marks time passing – each click a moment we can't get back. These are our unnoticed lasts: The final time your daughter asks for help with her math homework. The last time your grandmother tells that story about the time she met Frank Sinatra in an elevator. The final time your dad returns from the bathroom at a restaurant, rubs his hands together, and says, "Ready to rock 'n' roll?"11

Think about it — even all those little year-end rituals you don't even register as special are like the tumblers in your safe: the way your neighbor still puts up those slightly tacky inflatable decorations, how your aunt insists on making her infamous fruit cake that nobody actually eats, the specific way your dad organizes the living room for the New Year's party12. Each one requires its own combination of forward and backward movements, its own delicate balance of persistence and surrender.

One year will be the last time for each of these combinations. And here's what hurts the most: you won't know it's the last time until long after the tumblers have fallen silent.

C.S. Lewis dropped this idea about love and vulnerability. You can keep your safe locked forever. You can wrap it in blankets, bury it in your backyard, and pretend it doesn't exist. The contents will remain perfectly preserved — and perfectly useless13.

The safe doesn't care about your awareness. It doesn't care about your perfectly curated collection of memories, your carefully preserved traditions, your father's annual ritual of pretending he's forgotten how to carve the turkey just so your mother can show him again, even though they both know, and know that they both know, and know that they both know that they both know.

The combinations spin out: birthdays, traditions, random Tuesdays you didn't know were important until years later, when hindsight finally informs you—yes—that was the last time you…