Ending the Semester...

Christmas Day, 2010. One of the only white Christmases in my memory, and a strange one at that. I've never been driving through the snow on Christmas day, or expected to do so on the road from Charlotte to High Point, NC. The holidays are hard for a lot of people. What we've done here is to create this arbitrary period of time where we're supposed to reflect on our lives, think about what we've done, register regret, and look hopefully towards the future. It's a simple thing maybe, and we all do it in different ways, but for most people the end of a year is bittersweet. We're all a year older, we've all forgotten about the promises we made ourselves the year before, and we all have concerns about the future - that "undiscovered country."


Thankfully life is more complicated than all that, and the end of a year, however good or bad, is just as arbitrary as it seems. As some songwriter wrote once: "Nothing changes / On New Year's Day." He was right. Nobody changes like this. Real change is difficult and wrenching, and takes real work and dedication. No one changes overnight (I hate to generalize, but I've never seen it happen). And old Ebenezer Scrooge, if he had been a real man, would have taken a long time to get used to the idea that Christmas wasn't all that bad. Change, real change, takes vision, strength of character, and reflection. 


I don't mean for this to be some type of homily. I'm just sitting here on the eve of Christmas Day thinking about the end of my own year, and what that might mean to me. Looking forward, I get anxious about the various hoops I have yet to jump through, about all the studying that has yet to be done, about the next tasks that have to be tackled. But rest assured that I will tackle them, that I will continue to make many of the same mistakes I did last year, and that each task will be completed as I come to it in some fashion. But, like most of us, I try not to make the same mistakes twice, and to know my direction a little better by the time I sit down by myself on a cold winter's evening in December to write a blog entry that no one will ever read. So, in the light of all that, things get a little sweeter and a little less bitter, I think. 


And even if peace on earth is probably not something that any of us can look forward to celebrating, we can possibly be looking to get better at making an environment in which that type of thing might be possible someday. It will take many more years to come, but if we start thinking about it now, we might get there. 


I bid you peace.