Resolutions

Too often, the new year is simply a renewal of old habits; we forget that resolutions and good intentions are for more than paving roads. The new year does not mark an end or a beginning. Time has no divisions to mark its passage. Life comes in a continuum, and each year is simply another chance to get it right.

We could choose the weight. We could choose the being a little kinder, the personal improvement of reading more, the measured pace of all those activities we started and never finished--the quiet resolve to finally tackle those goals that seem to always land in tomorrow. These are all tempting. But after the magnitude of new classes, new books, new responsibilities, absent friends, and faraway family--we are sometimes dwarfed in the magnitude of survival--just getting through.

Pithy doesn't want to simply pass 2010. We want to master the lessons, do ALL the reading (even though, let's face it, sometimes life reads like a textbook); we want to originate ripples and inspire others to get it--hoping in the process to get it ourselves.

We resolve to:

Read to a child.
Watch a sunrise.
Laugh at ourselves.
Send a real letter.
Put on clothes straight from the drier.
Incorporate absquatulate into our vocabulary.
Learn to let it bend before it breaks.
Acknowledge that God is in control.

There are times that are cold, and cutting and empty, times when the spring of new beginnings seems like a distant dream. Those rhythms in life are natural events. They weave into one another as day follows night, bringing, not messages of hope or fear, but messages of how things are. We resolve to use this time to cultivate and create, to nurture our world and give birth to new ideas and ventures--to contribute to flourishing and abundance, seeing life in full bloom, energized and expanding.

There are no new beginnings, only new endings.