Here comes the 2009

Start it brand new!

Make no promises, you can't keep true.
Release those things stress brings.
Get involved with friends who care.
Take a trip, treat yourself, go somewhere;
Change the old dampened atmosphere.

Wake up each day thanking God for life,
when you lay down at night, "Thank Him" twice.

Fulfill your wildest dreams.
Others will get encouraged, from you they'll gleam!

Forget about the mistakes you've made.
They've already caused you to be delayed.

Build a home, ride a bike, ever wanted to fly a kite?
Read a book, get a new look.

Prosperity is in the air - order a larger checkbook.
Respond to positive, ignore the negative

Go ahead, "don't be afraid to live!"

Convinced yet?

I hope you are.

Cause repeating last year seems kinda bizarre

Your big question for 2009: What do you live for?

Looking back and looking forward as the year turns helps us make sense of what we are about, what we are for, where we are going. And to adjust course if our lives aren't going quite the way we had wanted. There's a sense in which we step out of our daily lives as the year turns, consider it from outside-in, before we step back into it again and get caught up once more. To 'lead' our own lives we really need to do this more than once a year, don't you think?

When we eventually look back, because there is far more 'back' to look to and far less 'forward', I'd like to be able to say something like this, which comes from Bertrand Russell's introduction to his autobiography. To be able to look back on a life like this, you have to have planned to live it, and have great self-awareness. I think that's a key lesson for me in how to lead your own life: know yourself and your passions; think ahead to what you want to look back on; then make it happen.

I'd take issue with Russell's bit at the end, tho' about not being able to alleviate poverty. You can't get rid of poverty and suffering. but, that's no excuse for not doing what you can in 2009. I know The Starfish Principle is corny, but it's true nonetheless. You know: that old story about the guy on the beach, when the tide has washed up thousands of starfish, watching one man throwing them back one by one. The guy says "You can do that all day, but you won't make a dent in it. There are hundreds of thousands of them. You can't make a difference." The other guy flings one more starfish back into the sea and says, "Well, it made a difference to that one," before reaching down for another. The story itself is just too weird for me to have ever warmed to it (might flinging starfish kill them anyway? Has anyone ever really seen hundreds of thousands of starfish washed up on a beach?), but the principle is sound, isn't it.

So, what do you want to look back on 2009 and say? Here's the inspiring Bertrand Russell that lives on my wall, looking back on his whole life:

What I Have Lived For

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

"I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness - that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that the saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what - at last - I have found.

"With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

"Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me."