Editor’s Note: This is a preview of a new blog post on my author website. Click here to read the full post.
New Year’s Day may be my favorite holiday. It’s a calm and quiet day. Those rowdiest the night before are lost in their hangovers while many businesses are shut down for the day. The revelry has come to an end; the holidays are officially winding to a close; and a new year faces us all, bright with possibilities if you are willing to look, or dark with forebodings if that’s what you choose to see. It also is, for me, a guiltless holiday. I do not need to see anyone but my wife, and if I want to spend the day reading and writing, reflecting, being quiet, making resolutions—well, I can do all that, and I do not have to feel as though I am failing anyone.
Despite the quietness of it, I find the holiday an optimistic one. In that first relaxed day of the new year, I turn my attention toward my resolutions for the year and all the possibilities for who and what I may yet become. I can’t help but think of the teeming potential of the next twelve months, those 365 unfilled days whispering their promises of tasks accomplished, goals fulfilled. Of course, as is my wont, I overpromise myself: I think I will do so much, from a raft of reading goals to planned writing, exercise and cleaning and personal betterment, new studies and courses of enrichment. Inevitably, plans fall by the wayside and goals go unfulfilled—and yet still I seem to accomplish much, or at least in recent years I have.
I come into the year so optimistic, most the time, and Kate has chided me for that the past few years. It is not that she is against optimism, but that she fears my curse: the past two years I have expressed optimism about the coming twelve months and then promptly fallen on misfortune. Well, so it goes; misfortune is a mainstay of life, alongside success. You can’t win them all, but you can always hope to.
What’s odd about this year is that my usual New Year optimism is far more subdued . . . click here to read the full post at joelcaris.com.
Into the Ruins 