A Whole New Year

Yesterday while visiting my friend at the hospital, I broke into song (probably to everyone's chagrin -- I'm not a great singer). I was trying to tell her it's a whole new world now that she's had her aortic aneurysm removed. She didn't seem to completely get the allusion, so I started singing the song from Aladdin, "A Whole New World". Fortunately for all of us, I couldn't remember most of the words, even though various pairings of my sons and granddaughters have sung it over the years. It's especially funny when, as they sit together at the piano, one of my sons sings the Princess Jasmine part and one of my granddaughters sings the Aladdin part. Anyway, I belted out maybe two lines and quit. Still, it's a good song, a great title, and an even better life philosophy -- even for those of us who haven't just had open-heart surgery.

I'm reminding myself to think of this new year as a "whole new world" too. I'm not big on New Year's resolutions, but like everyone I have a few things I want to work on this year. I've been talking about them quite a bit lately, so I won't get into them in detail. In summary, I'll be working on fitness and health, as well as improving/maintaining my home and looking for some different business opportunities. Even though I don't put much stock into making resolutions on one day of the year, I understand the appeal. The shift from one year to the next seems more significant than the shift from one month to the next or even one day to the next. But one of my resolutions-not-resolutions is to see every day as a new start. I try to do that, but I sometimes allow myself to get mired down in the day to day minutae and am not as present as I should be. That is changing now.