Tomorrow Is a New Year

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today is December 31, 2011. Which means that indeed tomorrow is a new year. And what better way to plunge into this new year than with Emerson's wise words? Here, Emerson talks in terms of days. How days entail beginnings and ends, separations, chances for reinvention, improvement.

But can't we just as easily, and fluently, speak of years? Shouldn't we begin this new year well and serenely with too high a spirit to be encumbered by last year's nonsense? I think so. I think we all, each and every one of us, owes it to ourselves to do just this. To begin again. Even if last year was a gem, involved scant existential blunders, absurdities and nonsense, isn't there something downright majestic about starting fresh, and fiercely?

I think so. I know so.

Tomorrow is a new year. And I welcome this new year with a happy, if hazy mixture of humility and hope. Mark my words here on the eve of 2011's first day: It will be a good one, this coming year.

Tomorrow is a new year. It is also my Big Girl's birthday. She will be five. I have been a mother now for half a decade. And it has changed me profoundly, this tending to little lives, this privilege beyond all privileges. Stay tuned for an ode to my first girl.

Tomorrow is a new year. Are you ready to begin again? Because I am.

Happy New Year, all! Do you have any general or particular plans for 2012?