Out with the Old, in with the New

Another year of our lives is coming to a close.

The year is ending not with a bang, but rather, with a whimper, as TS Eliot might have written of it.

It was the best of years. It was the worst of years as Charles Dickens might have put it.

Mark Twain wrote that the end of the year and the beginning of the new one is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions and then next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.

That’s just a bit harsh about the resolutions we make and the direction they often take.

Twain, however, made a good point.

The year 2010 has literally, physically, tangibly come and gone, just like that, with the snap of a finger.

Another year of our lives, has been lost to the ages, just like that.

None of us knows what awaits us in 2011.

The future remains indifferent to our hopes and wishes.

There is no way to know what is going to happen to us, to our nation, to the world, to the universe and to everything else we cannot truly understand in 2011.

There are many on this earth who neither little note nor much care that one year is ending and another is nearly upon us.

There are many living on this earth who believe that time does not exist, that the notion of time is irrelevant like the evening news, the morning newspaper, e-mail, twitter and Face-book.

For all of mankind’s dramatic advances, the earth remains a primitive, dangerous, violent habitat.

The year 2011 won’t be absent of this.

There remains a great deal of nihilism shared among vast numbers of the people existing on this globe.

It feeds naturally into the inclinations of those for whom money is God. And it seems to power many of those pretending to lead us in this nation.

The nihilism was classically Russian, a product of the Russian upper classes and intellectuals of Tolstoy’s era who believed that all our efforts on this earth are meaningless. That everything we seek, all that we do, whatever advances we have made, are all for naught.

Those of us who pay close attention to our friends and families, to our businesses and charities, to our towns and cities and states and nation, there is no such thing as life not mattering or the changing of the years from one to another having no meaning.

The year 2010 has exacerbated the suffering of the poor and enhanced the position of the very rich.

The year 2010 has perpetuated for another year two wars we are fighting. The outlook for 2011 does not appear to be guiding us toward change.

The year 2010 was another lackluster year for the economy which came undone two years ago.

The New Year would be a blessed occasion if new jobs are created, if new businesses expand, if the interest rates remain low, if the unemployment rate drops significantly, if the wasteful and tragic wars we’re fighting came to an end and the $1 trillion we spent in Afghanistan alone in 2010 could be put to better use here.

The year 2011 will be a great success if we advance the belief, as the great German philosopher Schopenhauer did – that the years come and the years go, that the only thing we truly own, is the moment.

Concentrate on that as 2010 passes into 2011.

Concentrate on the moment –and enjoy.