525,600 Minutes

Sorry that this update is rather late this evening. I've been talking with several friends and visiting with Shelby and Jordan and listening to music. All in all, a thoroughly pleasant evening! In any case, I shall not fail you, although this post might be rather shorter than usual.

"One of the illusions of life," so says Ralph Waldo Emerson, "is that the present hour is not the critical, decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day of the year. No man has ever learned anything rightly until he knows that every day is Doomsday." 

I find this sentiment strangely resonating. You see, folks, today I would like to illuminate the fact that I'm grateful for this year. Rather a large thing to encompass, that, but the theory is sound and it's my blog. So there.

I look back on the past five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes (yes, the song from RENT is now totally stuck in my head) and I'm amazed at how different my life truly is now than how it was then. I'm almost done with the first semester of my junior year of college ... how odd! When one is a freshmen, one can never quite visualize themselves as ever being any older. Yes, you make plans for a misty future, but it never seems real. Life now seems real in a whole new way. Some doors are closed now that were up open last year. I've lost family, dreams, possessions and loves. But most of all, I've lost some of the burdens I've been carrying. 

This year has been so hard in some ways, but so joyous in others. How can I regret these passing days, when each day holds such a potential for beauty? Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks again in his omnipresent apropos manner: "To the attentive eye, each moment of the year has its own beauty, and in the same field, it beholds, every hour, a picture which was never seen before, and which shall never be seen again." (I love this dude.)

So I am thankful for this year. This brief period in the great expanse of time heralds some coming changes which I rather balk at facing, yes, but it also holds the potential for marvelous things. Don't bemoan how long a year seems. Instead, we should rather see that a year is far too short a time to contain all of the wonders that our futures might hold. Don't shortchange a year.