The usual platitudes about the new year are familiar to us all: exercise more, eat less. We tailor them to our own lives: Choose the bicycle over the car, get up before the dog. Empty the compost before it overflows into a second and third bowl. Do more yoga, meditate, plant a bigger garden. Write letters.
I don’t make promises. But I love a new beginning and the hope it implies. Like the smell of new pencils at the start of a school year, the raw weather of January inspires me to look at where I have been, and begin to shape where I am going in a more deliberate and intentional way.
At our house, when we celebrate the New Year, along with good friends and celebratory toasts, we take time for reflection. What difficulties do we want to let go from last year? What hopes do we hold out for the year to come? We write these challenges and dreams on small slips of paper and burn them, releasing them to the heavens the way we blow on fuzzy dandelion seeds in spring, making wishes.
And then we turn back to the everyday, having visited the possible.
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