New Year: A blank page filled with potential

We spend January 1st walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
Ellen Goodman

New Year is traditionally a time when we reflect on the previous year and make resolutions or plans for the next. As a writer, I imagine the New Year as a blank page, one to be filled with  potential stories, ideas and characters which will form into a new work.

It’s December 31st and I’m working on finishing the book I’ve been working on in 2014. I’m excited about writing a new one, or maybe two, in 2015 —one is just forming and one has been on the back burner since 2010.

I’m also making plans for travel, volunteer work and writing in 2015.  I’m finding the  potential in myself and in the opportunities that are presented to fulfil my hopes, dreams and prayers.

The past year has been one where I’ve sought to find happiness, peace and a renewed sense of purpose. I’ve also had to let go as my daughter left home. We’ve suffered the loss of a loved one and the lessons about what’s really important in life, the love of family and faith in the midst have been painfully discovered once again.

Who knows what 2015 has in store? I step into a New Year with anticipation and hope with a desire to  keep learning, writing, loving, praying and changing. I don’t want to be the same as I was this year— or the year before. I feel like I’m in a re-formation as I question, interrogate and search myself in an atmosphere of faith, hope and love at the turn of the year.

I know the words I put on each page of the blank book of 2015  will be the right ones, even as I stumble, make mistakes or go down paths I don’t expect in my work, family and life.

Beginning a new year is like jumping  out of a plane and feeling the excitement of free falling towards the ground before the parachute opens. The space in between the parachute opening and landing on the ground at the end of the year, is where the faith and excitement  resides. I’m ready to jump into the New Year. Are you?

We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.
Edith Lovejoy Pierce