But we soldiered on. And okay, we are here at the threshold of the end of the old year and some of us who started on this sojourn have vanished along the way, but that's alright because that's what life really is, a series of hellos and goodbyes with pregnant pauses between and among different people.
You'd think (hope?) with our big brains, our command of language and our use of tools that we might be a bit better at carrying over into the new year a little more of the insight we gleaned from the old one, but it doesn't seem to happen. We get distracted by the bright and shiny stuff, not that we seem to do much with it and the timeless and treasured eventually becomes part of the scenery and the machinery. It hides in plain sight and we don't see it at all.
Tomorrow night's tolling of the (John Donne) bells at midnight that signal (and usher in) the Next New Year aren't a challenge or a warning, they are the turning of a page. Not the closing of a chapter or the ending of an age.
Nineteen years ago, tomorrow, those two remarkable cartoon creations, Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes, said goodbye forever as the first rays of the First Day of the Next Year were just peeping over the horizon.
They left quietly but with a prescient present that we can still employ to propel ourselves farther along long after the ball has dropped and the champagne corks have popped. There's a difference between childish and child-like that we would do well to remember when the confetti is through falling.
We're about to have a blank page to write upon-the moment to pen our first word is nearly at hand. Choose well-for all of our sake's-because for some of us that first word will prove to be the last one as well. Enjoy every sandwich.
-bill kenny
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