The End Approaches

As the year draws to a close, two things are certain to happen in my life. First, I will definitely have the mad and uncontrollable urge to clean my house, even the dark and secret rooms to which the doors are never opened when others are present. Second, I will begin to review the year past and go over it with the proverbial and cliched finetoothed comb to see how my life has changed for better and for worse in the year coming to an end. I suppose that both processes are actually two different expressions of the same need to set all things in order, as it were, before one things ends and a new thing begins.

New Year's Day is an arbitrary, manmade date on a calendar. It doesn't even line up with anything astronomically significant as once it did. That's why the power it has to make a person, well me anyway, stop and take stock of things never ceases to surprise me. Sitting up late and watching the old year die and the new year be born, even though I know it's sort of a created thing is moving. Every year, I say that I will simply go to bed early (tired out from all the manic housework, you see) and just let the old year go in peace, but year after year, I find myself staring at the clock at 11:59 with everybody else in this part of the world waiting for 200_ to dissolve into 200_.

I don't go out and party on New Years. I never have been a big partygoer. (Those of you who know me are shocked beyond all knowledge, I know.) I've often thought that the purpose of New Year's parties might be to help people not reflect so much, but rather to focus on the fact that regardless of what happened, it's over, everybody present survived in some form or another, and life marches on. Despite the fact that I'm not really a big fan of drunken revelry and the inevitable regretfest that follows it, (I mean, be an idiot if you want to, but live to remember it, and how much fun is it really if you have to pray nobody took any pictures of it?) there is something to be said in joining together with your friends in celebration of having made it through another long year and in defiance of whatever might be hurled at you by the Fates in the year to come.

I suppose however we choose to meet the New Year, in solitary reflection or group defiance and celebration, the point is that we are here to meet it at all. That's something to be grateful for. No matter what scars we may have earned in the year past, we survived. May we be stronger and wiser for it in the year to come.