Better Days

I am not the first to say that it has been difficult for me to blog these past weeks. Anyone with a pulse has been affected and dejected by the harsh developments of our world. In these last few months I have come to question some very fundamental aspects of my life: my business, my politics, my economic philosophy, my confidence in my country, and indeed in my own decision making. I don't know what depression is, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn I have experienced it. Nevertheless I remain hopefull.

I've never been one to hold much relevance in New Year's. It has always seemed frightfully arbitrary to me to assign so much significance to one tick of the clock. And yet this year seems in need of a tick and a tock. It is simplistic to categorize a year, and yet it is so easy to castigate 2008 and find in it nothing but hate.

Perhaps celebrating the new year has purpose after all. Beyond the excuse to get plastered mid-week, and to create a pyrotechnic inferno six months before Independence day. It is such fundamental human nature to fall into habit. Steven Covey says that it takes just 21 days to form a habit. 21 days! 21 days of eating wrong, of not exercising, of drinking too much, of giving too little. 21 days of falling into any of a thousand failings and we are set. And so it is that it matters that we restart the calendar. It is an opportunity to focus on resetting out lives. It is a chance to begin 21 afresh. It is a chance we mostly pass up.

So as we embark on this great unkown that is 2009. With a new president. A new start, and a new chance. Let us find 21 days worth of new beginnings that will become a year's worth of better days. In the words of the Goo Goo Dolls-- let's hope that "tonight's the night the world begins again."