From Us to You: Happy New Year

The year evaporates before our eyes. It's time to remember what has and hasn't happened during 2011 and to hope for better times ahead. It's time to say what we really want to say to one another.

Why hold back? Time is slipping away, and around 52 hours from now, the year will be gone, never to return.

A year ago, I would never have predicted that an entire set of 365 days could have come and gone without certain things happening. I would have thought that they had to happen.

And yet they didn't.

The silences, the absences, the unhappenings. They amaze me.

I wish more happenings had amazed me. There were a few, very special moments, that I will cherish.

But it is what it was. A disappointing year, at end. A year of few accomplishments, many sadnesses, including tragic losses. Of course, every year promises as much, but still, we begin anew every January expecting at least some sort of resolution of the unresolved issues from the year before, right?

The great confusions and disruptions of 2010 left me lost a year ago, seeking resolution that only others could provide. A year later, I'm still waiting.

No story is ever over until it's over. Nevertheless, one option left to you as the storyteller is to change the narrative arc, change its beginning and middle, once you realize you cannot affect its end.

You have, therefore, the power to decide that it never happened the way you used to think it happened.

That very special person you thought mattered so much was never really who you thought she was. She never fell in love with you, nor your words. In fact, she never even existed, now that you think clearly about it.

You see, she was nothing more than a figment of your over-active imagination.

Some would call this insanity.

I call it getting your history straight. Time may be running out on this calendar year, but in the realm of how our mutual history will be told, time is running out even more rapidly.

Time, in fact, is up.

Love, or what we thought of as love, dies and rots as certainly as does flesh and blood, muscle and skin. Dust to dust. When it reaches the very end, there is nothing at all left to say. Except that the story you both once thought you were creating, left unresolved, will never, therefore, be told. It will fade instead into nothingness.

Thus is all art, all magic, all life. Not all stories get told, only the special ones. Only the ones where both or all parties have the courage to be honest.

Happy New Year! May 2012 and the stories it brings contain more resolution than the nebulous, foggy ambiguity that will apparently be 2011's only enduring legacy, at least for you, and for me, and most permanently for us.

Happy New Year, once again, dear friends, listeners, and fellow travelers.

-30-