Let's hope it's a good one

LISTEN. An old friend once told me he believes that what you do on January 1 sets the template and pattern for your year.

I don't myself think there's anything magical about any particular calendar date. Or anything else, for that matter. What people call magical I call marvelous, or wondrous, or surprising, or improbable... but never mind, that's a different conversation.

I do accept the spirit of my friend's statement, enthusiastically. I believe in fresh beginnings and new seasons and returns to life and good intentions.

And so, on this fresh morning of 2021, I hereby proclaim the intention of capturing more reflections at, or before, or around dawn, recalling Thoreau's definition: "morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me." So, that's a good intention I can fulfill at any hour of the day or night. Being a morning person, though, I'd best intend to get up and doing first thing. 

One happy discovery of 2020 was that my dogs are not morning persons, they're perfectly content to wait for me to finish my coffee and my typing before we venture out. Especially on a rainy day. Oddly, it's supposed to be 72 degrees here later, when the rain stops. We'll wait, as I proclaim my good intentions. 

I've noted another good intention, to follow Peter Singer's advice and resolve to be a better person. As Henry says, "moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep." Waking up, in the Singer sense of moral reform, means in part deliberately not participating in the consumer economy in the usual way. No more impulse buys, fewer gratuitous and doomed stabs at immediate material gratification, more deliberation about how to do the most good with finite discretionary resources.

I was more diligent in 2020 about private journaling, recalling Emerson's instigating question to young Thoreau: "What are you doing now? Do you keep a journal?" So I make my first entry to-day. HDT, Oct 22, 1837. In 2021 I intend to be more diligent still, after seeing Madeleine L'Engle's smart words on the subject:

If you want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you. Where you just put down what you think about life, what you think about things, what you think is fair and what you think is unfair. And second, you need to read. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader. It's the great writers who teach us how to write. The third thing is to write. Just write a little bit every day. Even if it's for only half an hour — write, write, write.

That's another intention: read more, and more variously, to feed the impulse to "write, write, write... every day."

Henry again: “No day will have been wholly misspent, if one sincere, thoughtful page has been written.”

And while I'm rehearsing inspirational homilies on this latest Day 1, here are some more I've found emboldening in the past.

• “Show up, show up, show up, and after a while the muse shows up, too.”-Isabel Allende
• “A small daily task, if it be really daily, will beat the labors of a spasmodic Hercules…” -Anthony Trollope
• “I always write a thing first and think about it afterwards, because the easiest way to have consecutive thoughts is to start putting them down.”-E.B. White, who also said
• "I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."

Above all, as the pandemic and pusillanimous partisan nastiness persist into this new year:

• "Keep your health, your splendid health. It's worth all the truths in the firmament." William James

And so, in service of bodily, spiritual, intellectual, and emotional health,  my most urgent homiletic advice to myself and anyone else who'll listen:

• Just keep moving.

Which I'll heed as soon as the rain abates and the pooches stir.

Happy New Year