Writing 2014 Will Take Some Getting Used To.....

If you partied to close out the old year, here we are and welcome to the end of your first hangover of the new one. One of the nice things about not drinking alcohol anymore is that the looking out the window today at the first day of the next year isn't as dog-awful as it's been in decades past.

It wasn't that I drank that was the problem. It had a lot more to do with the fact that I swallowed. Even now, the sunshine bores the daylights out of me but I'm also deathly afraid of the dark, hence my dilemma.

So clear-eyed and empty-headed, I look out on the first day of our new year and can already see the gap between the promise and the performance at every level-personal, professional and political. I think I even got them in the correct order, for me at least. Your mileage may vary but not your result.

Did you make resolutions? And have you already broken one or more of them? I don't think the Guinness Records people keep track so you can safely claim whatever you wish and however you will. Of course, escaping your own judgment will be harder to do since you know best your own tricks and traps.

I have hopes not resolutions for 2014. I hope this year to be a better person to the people I have in my life and to whom I have sometimes been less than kind. I will try to be slower to anger and quicker to forgive. I should get plenty of practice and, I fear, in turn will provide it for others as well. I'll also add that I'm not going to allow the past to color the future and I accept I cannot be forgiven for sins I've not yet committed.

This is Day One. We can go anywhere and do anything. We just have to decide and then agree on what anything will look like.

A New Year is a little bit like a first snowfall. We're all very concerned about the first marks we make and then we just go about our business. Too bad we can't bottle that sense of unlimited optimism we feel on this, the first day of the year, and break it out when things get serious and the going becomes harder, like tomorrow and all the days that will follow it.

Be of good cheer (unless you were too much of that last night, in which case perhaps still be it, but quietly). So much happened in 2013-at times it felt that too much happened. But because and despite it all, it's 2014. The paths to today are many, the destination is shared. Some of us arrived in more comfort, health or wealth than others, here we are.

With all due respect to the more stridently jingoistic among us, the farther out in space you go, the more alike we look. Perhaps that might remind us that here on the big Blue Marble we should leave a little more for somebody else-perhaps take a slightly smaller piece of the pie as the plates get passed around and remember that lesson on the importance of sharing we learned back in kindergarten.

Enjoy today's still-has-that-New Year-smell-it's as close to heaven on earth as we will get, and for some of us it as close as we'll ever get. Es gibt viel zu tun, packen wir an!
-bill kenny