An attempt at completion

Hey Joe, good to hear from you buddy. Hows the new year treatin' you? Fair enough.

You know, they used to say that each year had its own life. Anthropomorphically. Every January 1st a new baby is born, and over the course of the year it ages. By December 31st, that babe is ready to let the world move along without them. It adds a touch of the mystic to think of the year we experience in our lives, so fleeting, as being the entire span of life for a man or a woman. It calls to mind the contentment we experience in our lives. I've heard a couple of fifty year old women discussing how satisfied they are with life, and how if it ended today they wouldn't complain, supposing they were still in a state to do so. So, If it takes fifty-odd years for a woman to come to terms with her life and be happy, could this infant, born to live but one year, find peace within itself? I like to think so. I like to think of old man 2008 slipping away into the night with a half smile and a sparkle in his eye. I think in my mind this yearly babe reminds me of the ideas we already hold. In winter the babe is born, in the spring she blossoms into the healthy pink of life and newness, in the summer and fall she experiences the majesty of the world, and finally in the end of the year knows understanding. Consider, what could we learn if we simply took a year and did nothing but attempt to enjoy the quiet complexity with irreverent awe in a way which does not expect a clinical understanding, but the living thing's communion? To experience life, without burden of contribution, but with necessity of contemplation. How much would we learn? Unfortunately, we cannot all know this year. Hopefully over our lives we can find 365 days to take the time and enjoy our existence. It can be hard to do so. Time constraints or personal difficulty burden us. But there's no rush. There is time. After all, there's a three day old babe crying somewhere with no idea what is coming. But she's got 362 days to figure it out.

I know, Joe, I ramble, but stick with me. There's something else I want to tell you today.

When I was at home, spending a quiet new years with a few old friends, my good friend Andrew taught me something that I'd like to share. It surprised me. We were looking through the movies in my basement, and he spotted an old rubik's cube. He solved it, within a couple minutes. He explained to me how he did it. That cube had lain unsolved for at least twenty years. Twisted and confused. He came along, and he understood how it should be, how it was meant to look, and so he fixed it. I can't help but wonder if there is someone out there who could do that for me. For any of us. Solve us, from these half completed states. When I was younger I saw my brother start taking stickers off the cube, so that he could just fix it to look right. Now I realize how unfortunate that would have been. Not only the shallow depth of the thinking involved - the temporary band-aid solution - but the tragedy of a twisted and contorted inside that will never be solved, because from the outside it looks just fine.

In the spirit of the new year, with the new babe still crying, I'd like to think that we all have a little solving to do. We don't need to tell ourselves to do it. I figure, once we understand, it's going to happen one way or another. There's time. We'll be fine.

That's it. So long.