Contemplating Next Year

While it's still a bit early to start making New Year's Resolutions, it's by no means to early to start contemplating what to do with the year getting ready to start just a couple of rather short weeks from now.

While this past year has been full of changes, both good and bad, I am (in some strange regards) an eternal optimist despite what some folks might think of me.  Inevitably, I go into the new year with a hopeful heart that what has troubled me in the prior 12 month period will make it's way elsewhere, and whatever new things happen to crop up to take it's place are more easily and pleasantly dealt with.  Now, a week prior to the Christmas holiday, I find myself once again caught in the grip of that eternal optimism when faced with the prospects before me.

Aware as I am of the various challenges I will have to face over the course of the upcoming months (digging myself the rest of the way out of my financial hole, dealing with various other issues some of which aren't of the most pleasant nature) I cannot help but face the turning of the year with a strangely cheerful heart and lightness of spirit.

I have, after all, finally put certain things behind me which had consistently held me back in the past: numerous hangers on who weren't the friends they claimed to be, dragging me further towards financial ruin and headache than they were ever a help; certain emotional stumbling blocks which I clung to as though the security blanket of a small child, though the gods know that those items were hardly healthy things to have held on to over the years; my dependence upon others than myself for various things that I should have been relying upon only myself for.

As I look back over the past year's entries into this erstwhile journal, sparse though they might be at times, I find myself chuckling that I allowed myself to become so mired in my own past.  While those who refuse to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it, those who refuse to let go of the past are doomed as well - not to repetition, but to stagnation.  I'm incredibly tired of feeling like I'm stagnating, and therefore I'm making a conscious effort to put the past where it belongs - firmly behind me, not forgotten, but neither is it going to be clutched to me as a protective shield convincing me not to move forward into my own future.

It promises to be as much of an adventure as this past 12 month span has been, if considerably more pleasant in some respects.  I guess we'll just have to see how much of an adventure it turns out to be, and whether my eternal return to hope is justified.