A Rough Start

I've recently started playing more Mario Kart. In that game, if you start holding the acceleration button down at the right time during the countdown at the start of the race, you can get a speed boost to help you get started; however, you have to time it right. Start too late, and the speed boost won't be as powerful as it could have been. Start too early, and the "speed boost" will instead cause your engine to stall out, making you wait a moment before being allowed to accelerate the normal way.

Yet, in my experience, the beginning of the race doesn't matter a whole awful lot. Mario Kart also has items. These items have a negative feedback loop with the character's current performance in a race. When you pick up an item box, the item you get is "randomly selected" based on your position. If you're already winning, you'll get an item that's pretty weak and mostly useless. But if you're behind, you're likely to get better items that will help you close the distance and perhaps even advance a place or two in the race.

Besides, even without the items giving the racers in the back more help than the racers in the front get, racing skill can generally overcome a rough start. There are several tricks that can give you a momentary burst of speed if you can pull them off without driving yourself off the road, and even staying on the road can sometimes be a challenge which, if accomplished, can help a racer perform well. Stumbling at the starting line isn't so big a deal when you can make up for that stumble by racing well across the rest of the race.

I say all this because January 1st, 2022 may not have gone great for everyone. I'm sure that some people's year may be off to a rough start. However, that doesn't mean that the entire year is doomed. Luck usually balances itself out, forming a neat bell curve with good and bad luck fairly evenly balanced on both sides of the median, and of course, our personal decision to dust ourselves off and move forward persistently can overcome the struggle of having a bad day. Even if today didn't go the way we wanted it to, we can put in the work to make sure future days go better. With enough diligence and the right attitude, we can make sure 2022 is a decent year, no matter how it started.

So, some people's start-of-the-race speed boost didn't have as much umph as they were hoping for, or even flooded their engines and caused them to stall. The race isn't over yet. In fact, it's barely gotten started. We still have a full three laps (or 364 days) ahead of us. Those laps (or days) can still go well for us, whether or not the first one got off to a rough start.