December 31, 2012
Monday

What can be said in New Year rhymes
That’s not been said a thousand times?
— Ella Wheeler Wilcox, 1850-1919
American poet

I’ve spent several hours over the last few days reviewing my year by reading my entire handwritten journal (410 pages this year), plus about 50 pages in the handwritten project diary I started keeping for my novel-in-progress when I got back from Bread Loaf. This was part of the Not-So-Big-Life Year End Ritual I found last year but did not complete. Actually doing it this year counts as an achievement for me, since I’ve been saying that my six-word autobiohraphy should be “She never finished anything.”

Reading this material, a haphazard chronicle of events, facts, prayers, quotations from my reading, fiction exercises, notations about the time and temperature when I sit down to write, I discovered some things (I read more than I thought, mostly short stories) and was confirmed in some things (the dislocations that began in September derailed almost all of my best-laid plans).

And here I am on New Year’s Eve, the next-to-last day of Holidailies, having wobbled in that as well but happy that I had more enthusiasm for it than I had last year. Two pieces were chosen as “Best of” pieces, and that makes me very happy.

The graphic below showed up on a friend’s Facebook feed this morning, and I have appropriated it. The Christmas balls are in the very colors that I use to represent my Six Goals of a Quality Life. I’ve written them down for what seems like a thousand times. Here’s to one more chance to get it right.

“The new years come, the old years go,/ We know we dream, we dream we know,” writes Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a thousand times more: Thank you for reading, so much, so often.