the gray lady gets all poetic & shit

Really, really stellar editorial on beginnings, change and the new year:

But deep within us is the habit of looking forward, a habit as powerful as the belief that our lives are somehow external to us and that we can pick them up and rearrange them at will. We live profoundly in time, painfully aware of the way the new years stack up one by one.

We also live immersed in intention, trying to make the most of what time has to offer. There are days when the likelihood of real renewal seems almost impossible, when our lives seem utterly conditioned by the past. And then there are those days when renewal seems certain, merely a matter of making the right choices, consciously. It would be a coincidence if one of those days of rebirth happened to fall on the first of the year.