Random Thoughts on the New Year

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you.  You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.

~Mary Pickford

I love calendars.  I love picking out the perfect one and jotting down all the important birthdays and anniversaries.  I love noting doctor’s appointments and other miscellanea of life.  By the time December rolls around, my calendar has become a mini-journal of the closing year.  I find it fun to look over the pages and remind myself of all that the last year has brought my way.

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling;
He who makes one is a fool.
~F.M. Knowles

I am no better at keeping resolutions than the next person, and yet I find myself making them year after year.  This year will be no different though I’m calling it a “promise to myself to change my life in some way...a promise which is randomly coincidental with New Years Day" instead of a “New Years Resolution”.  Maybe I’ll succeed.  Maybe I’ll fail miserably.  Either way, I’ll learn a lesson and maybe gain some insight into my self in the process.

We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day. 
~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

I find that each New Year brings an excitement that I can’t quite explain.  It is some odd combination of losing the old and venturing into the new; and it fills my heart with joy.  Never mind the fact that ‘last year’ has always been good to me too.  I have after all, been very blessed. 

This past year in particular was quite wonderful.  We welcomed our second sweet little boy into the world and he makes our hearts full and our family complete.  I don’t regret a single moment of 2011, and yet I still face the new year with the same happy anticipation I remember having on the first day of every school year growing up.  The feeling of wonder may fade in the months ahead (much like it did back in the school days of my youth), but today it feels like new teachers and new locker combinations and new friends in new classes.  Ah, the joy of the new!  What fun we shall have!!

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.  ~Benjamin Franklin

What exactly is that song Auld Lang Syne about?  I wonder every year….but not until right now have I ever bothered to look it up.  Are you as curious as I was?  Check out some background HERE.

I hope you have a fabulous New Year full of good health and happiness.  God bless you and yours!

-Wicked Happy Christy