All the Years That I've Wasted with Nothing to Show

We've been here before-battered, bloody and bruised from too much of this year. We looked forward to 2016 with expectations that no decade, much less a single year, could have possibly fulfilled. and, really to no one's surprise, it didn't. 

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. 

Perhaps we get distracted by the bright and shiny stuff, not that we seem to do much with it and the timeless and treasured eventually just becomes part of the scenery and the machinery. It hides in plain sight and we don't see it at all.

Tonight's tolling of the (John Donne) bells at midnight that signal (and usher in) the Next New Year are neither a challenge nor a warning, they are the turning of a page. Not the closing of a chapter or the ending of an age.

Twenty-one years ago, today, 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 further along long after the mirror 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 may prove to be the last one as well. That doesn't mean you should hesitate before writing; just the opposite!  Enjoy every sandwich.
- bill kenny

Time the Conqueror

One of the amazing things about this era of worldwide connectivity is how you can reunite with people you never actually knew and yet knew of. Sometimes it's a heartening experience and other times more disheartening when you discover the person behind the facade is someone you would never choose to otherwise know.

I never really have had that problem since nearly all of the people I've known in all my years here on the ant farm are well rid of me when we go our separate ways and relief, not regret is what they more than not most often feel. If I had a dime for everyone with whom I had lost contact who was happy when we re-established it, I'd have closer to four cents. So much for change I can believe in.

I'm on a message board of an organization I was in a long time, well over three decades ago, with hundreds of members from various eras with cohorts and generations of folks who worked in all aspects of the operation. Some people worked there for many years, spanning decades and are touchstones for a lot of us who don't really have a lot else in common. It's nice, but it can set you up to get hurt if you don't tread lightly.

One of the group posters, who is (and this will surprise you) considerably older than I am, shared that he's about to return to the workforce (in this case, radio broadcasting). He's very much old-school, with a great voice and terrific phrasing, very important a generation or two of broadcasting ago.

I was discomfited years ago to discover he was nothing like the icon I had admired professionally for decades when through our joint membership in the group, I had the opportunity to get to know him as someone beyond the microphone. Crestfallen might be a word I'd use, or chastened by the encounters and I avoided his postings by not dropping by the group board.

So in recent days when I had a note from another former colleague asking me about  the pending 'return to the arena' I had to catch up on a lot of postings including one announcing he was "...ready to kick a$$ again." I hope he does but perhaps on his way to the studio that first day 'back' he'll pass a river, not unlike one of the three that runs through my current hometown that will  give him pause and food for thought.

It's important to realize no one enters the same river twice because both the river, and you, have changed. Not always for better. And to remember in this life, change is both a constant and our only constant companion.
-bill kenny