New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year's, everyone!

This is a short post, so I'll get right to the point:

1.) Read at least one book (for pleasure) a month. This is raising the bar, but will be most beneficial.

2.) Write one page a week on at least one of my extracurricular writing projects. This was a goal before, but I got bogged down in outlines. The stories I had all needed planning and research. I have some ideas now that will let me just write to practice my prose. Worst case scenario, I have 52 pages written by the end of the year.

3.) Never kiss until the fourth date or until the two of us have decided to date exclusively, whichever comes later.

4.) Finish all necessary dental work. After two-and-a-half years, that will be a welcome relief.

5.) Graduate with Honors. That only leaves an honors thesis and about twenty Great Works events, and fourteen responses, to go.

6.) Get out of the USA. England, China, Japan, Taiwan, Nepal, somewhere - I need to go.

This past year was an interesting one. It included many trials, some of them self-inflicted. All of them have flowed on by. I grew up in and around rivers, and I'm reading several books using rivers as a theme (Nine Ways To Cross a River, New Found Land); I find the idea of life as flowing water an apt metaphor. I've had successes, and those have flowed past, leaving me enriched and edified. I've made mistakes, and those too have flowed by.

Changing metaphors:
"And shades of night are falling dense and fast, like sable curtains drifting o'er the past. Pale through the gloom the newly fallen snow wraps like a shroud the silent earth below - as tho 'twere mercy's hand had spread the pall: a token of forgiveness unto all" ("The Wintry Day Descending to Its Close," Hymns no. 37).

And so, I continue my course. Upstream, I think; I am not sure I know how to steer with the current.

Anyway, Happy New Year's! I hope your holidays have been refreshing and edifying for you, and that you have the strength for the New Year.