New Year! New hope! Life! Love! Happiness! Trials! Measures! Minutes! Seconds!

We all revolve around traditions! Drinking beer, wearing green and eating corned beef on St. Patty's day.... Family get-togethers during Christmas and Thanksgiving...eating Turkey and stuffing... giving presents... watching beams of fire light up the sky in the warm month of July... wearing black to mourn the loss of a loved one... even simply roasting marshmallows, singing songs, and telling stories around a campfire. We pride ourselves in our long standing traditions, finding that they give us consolation and give us our own special place in this world when we partake in them...
~~Welcoming in the New Year also embraces its own traditions... wearing crazy hats, eating pork... banging pots and pans and making as much noise as possible when the ball drops in Time Square.. but the most valued tradition is centered around the idea of "moving on", "making a new start", and "differences"!
So what's going to be different this year? We all are going to face the same things we always have... There will be tears of joy and tears of sadness, we will go through trial and err, measuring losses and gains, we will strive for happiness and some days find gleams of it and then some days it will slip away. But The thing that will be different this year is the hope! Hope will never go away as long as we embrace through tears, and joy, sorrow, happiness, anger, and love. Hope is always there! Where there is hope there is no need to focus on regrets and say that this will be better than the last year because with hope everyday is new! A fresh start! Different! Because Hope is the difference!

i end this entry with one of my favorite songs ...we measure things in seconds in minutes--moments of love and hope, happiness--seasons of love!

"Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Six Hundred Minutes/Five Hundred Twenty-Five Thousand Moments so dear/.... How Do You Measure - Measure A Year?/... Measure your life, measure your life in love....."