A better day - and a chance to take stock

All the sickies seem to have turned a corner.

Happy Old Year!

There were many blessings and challenges in 2010.  New, dear friendships.  Loved ones moved away.  Sometimes both of those things together.  New beginnings: weddings and pregnancies among dear friends, for instance.  Relationships transformed: long-sought reconciliation; a final, beloved parent gone home to be with is bride and his savior for all eternity.  Old friendships renewed, via a visit to San Antonio for our goddaughter's Confirmation.  A new approach to old and new issues: Teri and I spent 3 months dialoguing every day, for the first time since our Marriage Encounter over 22 years ago; I reentered therapy to find a better solution to some of my struggles, including the depression that began to plague me this year.  And a milestone birthday spent with people we love, even if it didn't include some of the ones who were most important to us.

This annual ritual of taking stock of the past 12 months is, of course, an arbitrary thing.  The boundary points we establish between the weeks and months and years are convenient, useful constructs that allow us to get our minds around the passage of our lives.  Today is already a "new year," in the sense that a trip around the sun can be considered to start anywhere along our orbit and to be completed at the same point approximately 365.25 days later.  No need to limit it to a particular time of day, either.

Yet it's still useful to have a "new beginning" point that doesn't happen so frequently, and I plan to take full advantage of this one.  I plan to nurture thinking patterns that help me be the person I want to be, think I should be, rather than undermine me.    

And I plan to continue some things that I've begun previously.  I will keep turning away from the darkness of doubt and despair.  I plan to grow as a person, as a beloved son of a loving God and a follower of my Savior, and to pray consistently and fervently for those I love.  I plan to continue to embrace the relationships that mean the most to me, and to resume using the tools that best help me to nurture the most important of those relationships.  (That latter part isn't entirely up to me - one of them is a two-person tool - but I need to do my part in encouraging us to use it.)

Thus will I discover all that 2011 will bring . . .