New Day, New Year

I like startings overs. Redo's are one of my favourite parenting options, sometimes even for the kids.  I do enough things wrong in a given day to be glad to try again, at least once or twice.

The New Year is our culture's most storied Do Over. Baby New Year, clean slates, fresh starts, a brand new Life To Do List cleverly marketed as Resolutions...  all these ways to take on Starting Again.

But alas, there is no Starting Again in this life.  There's just pressing on, moving forward, picking up, going a few more steps. I find this liberating, suprising for a girl who loves her redo's.

The upside to learning that the new year isn't just another chance to Get It Right is that there is no pressure do so.  Praise be!  While there is no erasing of yesterday's errors, neither is there any expectation of foiling tomorrow's foibles and failures. 

Instead, the first day of this next trip around the sun (oh Jimmy, you do have a way with words) is just the first of day of the next trip around the sun. A repeating of the rhythms of our planet, that's about it.  A chance to maybe improve, I guess if you're motivated that way.  But even then, circumstances are such that you can't really assume that you'll have the same material to work with, so even hoping for improvement might prove unwise.

So I'm just stepping into the year ahead thinking that maybe I'll try for endurance.  Or actually, no. I'm hoping for willingness.  Willingness.  Oh, it's coming together:  a friend posted on FB a quote, "For all that has been, thanks. For all that will be, Yes!" (Fr. Richard Rohr).  That's what I want to take into 2011 - Yes.  


As I did what I call prayer through my Advent Turmoil, wherein I aim my self-absorbed thinking heavenwards and hope that the Lord overhears and does something about me, I did find myself thinking a new thing.  When this happens, I call it God Answering, believing as I do that it would require the supernatural to change my mind about anything.  This new thing I started thinking about That Person was that the best I could hope to get to in my heart was a willingness to be changed.  Hoping to be healed wasn't going to get me anywhere as long as I not-so-secretly preferred to be ill in this particular direction.  But maybe hoping to be willing to be healed would be possible. 


And so when there is no longer a need for me to make a list of activities to be crossed off a list, or ways to improve, there is all this energy free to say Yes! to be willing to live the life that comes in the year ahead.


I can SO do that.  Happy New Year!