This post is dedicated to my on-line community; to know and have access to such gifted writers and poets is wonderful. Having writers and poets as friends is a blessing.
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
- Dr. Wayne Dyer
“The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning.”
- Ivy Baker Priest
I spent the last quarter of 2009 and ended it too, for many reasons, feeling rather cynical, toward many matters – matters big and small, personal matters as well as matters concerning our world at-large – and in my cynicism, and this speaks to the danger of it, over those few months I didn’t consider the impact another new year could make. I ignored it really. The passing of the old year to the new. The turning of a corner. After all, what difference can one day make? Why is January 1st different than December 31st? Are not my circumstances today, the first day of 2010, the same as they were less than twenty-four hours ago in 2009? Well, I suppose in one way, dates do not make a difference. Our lives are our lives. And the circumstances that make them our lives are there from one day to the next. A continuous thread. We carry on. We live through our circumstance what ever it may be. We plow and push onward with the rising of the sun and with its setting lay down tired heads.
But in another way, time’s passing, dates and milestones – the turning from one year to another – matters most profoundly to us at our conscious level as well as our sub-conscious level. In fact, it may be at the sub-conscious level where we most rely upon the milestone of the New Year holiday and it implications. From its very name, we infer the possibilities that a new day, a new year may bring.
Hope hinges on such a holiday. Hope is reborn on such a holiday – that we might reach down deep and reality-check the fear and cynicism of yesterday and realize today, this day, is new; a new year to see our lives differently, to revisit our habits, our thinking and see our world is not flat, it is round and the place we thought was an end, we see now is only a beginning. And the aspects of our lives we find to have been much at the root of our cynicism -the duties and the tasks, the responsibilities and the battles, the ugliness even -these matters from twenty-four hours ago, they are not gone. They do not disappear. They await us still, to be dealt with come Monday. But that we might view them in a new light, approach them head-on from a new place that in this way, we come to experience our own revolution of sorts. A very personal revolution. One no one else may see, but one we might profoundly feel injected with a new energy, a new hope, a new excitement toward the possibilities that the new year may bring. And this is Heaven’s joke; when we allow ourselves to be open to revolution, to potential, open to possibilities, that they exist – possibilities come. Our own revolution manifests itself in our actions. I’ve seen it. I’ve experienced it. Hope will always trump cynicism. Sometimes we just need a reminder. Like a date on our calendar. Wow. What a difference a day makes. Happy New Year.
[copyright 2010 Darren King]
