New Year’s Reflections
Jan K. Nielsen

A new year stretches before us.
It’s like a blank page
that waits for the next chapter of our stories.
It’s a chance to start over,
to begin again.  
What are your wishes,
your hopes
for this new year?

Even though it is a new year
last year’s news hasn’t gone away.
It’s undeniable: we live in uncertain times.
Even though our economy has been shaky
for more than the past year,
over the past few months we have been inundated
with news of falling stock prices, rising unemployment,
and entire industries in trouble.
And over the past several days,
we’ve heard tragic reports
of more fighting in the Middle East.
We hope and pray for better days,
and for peace of this earth.

Over the holidays, I heard some good advice
for life in these uncertain days.
It went something like this:
Do three things every day.
First, stand just a little closer to someone you love;
second, name something in your life
 for which you are grateful;
third, limit your news consumption
to some reasonable amount,
like maybe 15 minutes, once or twice a day,
and then turn it off, and go back to your life.   
It makes spiritual sense:  love, gratitude, and peace in the heart.  
This is not to suggest that we go around uninformed,
just that we limit our intake
of anxiety inducing media coverage.  
Know what’s going on, but don’t let the news consume you
and don’t let the tone and tenor of cable news,
for example, become your “default mode”
for engaging with life.
It breeds high anxiety, and that’s not good,
either for our bodies, or for our souls.      

None of us knows for sure
just how things will unfold for our country,
the world economy,
or how things will turn out for us, here,
on the home front, in our own lives.
Uncertainty, and not knowing how things will turn out, is just part of life.
Uncertainty in life, though,
can keep us spiritually awake.

When the path ahead of us seems unclear,
it’s all the more important
to pay attention to the steps we take,
and to the choices we make.
It’s an old saying, but it’s true:
We can’t always control what happens to us in this life,
but we can choose how we will respond.
Our choices tell the stories of our lives.   
Or as my wise Aunt Alma used to say,
“It’s not the hand you are dealt in life;
its how you play it that counts.”
It is true: how we live matters.
At the start of a new year,
especially this new year,
it makes spiritual sense
to take an honest look at how we live.  
 
In these first days of a new year,
we often hear talk of new year’s resolutions.
Despite good intentions, though, so many resolutions
can end up forgotten in the busyness of life.
When a new year comes,
instead of a list of resolutions,
I make it my practice
to take what I think of as a “spiritual inventory.”
I try to take an honest look at myself, and my life.
I ask questions like:
How do I want to live in this new year?
What do I need to begin?
What do I need to let go?
What do I want to do more of, or do less of?
How can I be more gentle and more loving,
with both others and myself?
Perhaps most of these
can be summed up in one question:
What do I need to learn?

I believe there is always more to learn in this life.  
No matter our age,
we can always grow,
always deepen the wisdom of our souls.
When we are open to learning and growth,
we stay spiritually awake and alive.
When we hold back and close ourselves off
from learning and growth,
we cease to live;
we just go through the motions of life.
Our Unitarian “prophet,” Henry David Thoreau,
wrote from Walden Pond:
“I wish to live deliberately . . . .
I wish to learn what life has to teach, and not, when I come to die,
discover that I have not lived.”
Thoreau’s words point us toward what is perhaps
the primary spiritual issue for all humankind,
and that is: time.  

We have only so much time in this life.
The eternal question is:  
How will we live the time we have?
I have carried Thoreau’s words with me
for most of my adult life.
His words took hold of me and would not let me go
as I tried to decide
whether to follow a calling to the ministry.    
“Why should we live in such a hurry and waste of life?” Thoreau asks.
We can ask ourselves:
How can I live this day, this year,
so that I will not, when I come to die, discover that I have not lived?

Time is indeed the “ultimate luxury,”
an important truth to remember everyday,
in any economy.   
It’s been said that every preacher carries inside
no more than a half dozen or so sermons,
and those same sermons
just get preached over and over.
The words may be different,  
the sources different,
but the message is the same.  
Time, as some of you well know, is one of mine;
it’s a theme that echoes again and again in my words.    
Maybe it’s because
both of my parents died suddenly and too young;
I live daily with the reminder that life can be cut short,
that we can never take for granted a new day.  
This I know:  life, with all its joys and sorrows,
is a gift,
a precious gift, not to be wasted, but to be lived.   

We live our lives, of course, in the “every day,”
not all at once,
but chapter by chapter,
page by page, moment by moment.
Some religious teachings encourage people
to look beyond this life
to find the Eternal in some better place,
in a paradise somewhere else,
a heaven beyond this earth.
Our Unitarian and Universalist heritages
teach us instead to look around us, in the here and now,
and see that this life, in all its glory and messiness,
is sacred;
this day is truly a gift.    

Look to the “small things” in the every day of this life
teaches the poet Anna Kamienska,
“ . . . one word. . . one smile
. . . a tear wiped away . . .
a prayer broken off in mid-word by sleep . . .
It’s not from the grand
but from every tiny thing
that it grows enormous (she tells us)
as if Someone was building Eternity
as a swallow its nest
out of clumps of moments.”
In these first days of a new year,
what if we made it our practice
to look around us and gather those “small things,”
those “tiny clumps of moments”
that remind us that the ground we walk is sacred,
and every breath we take a gift?  
What might change in the stories of our lives
if we woke up to the fact
that we can be the builders of our own eternities?  

A new year offers us the chance
to look at our life stories,
to read them again from their beginnings
to the present day.  
Might this new year
be the time for you to begin a new chapter --
to write a new page of your story?
How do you want your story to read?
What will your story say about you,
your values,
and how you spent your time in the year 2009?

I leave you with these lines
from a poem by David Whyte.
When it first crossed my desk months ago,
I marked it with this date, January 4, 2009,
with you and your lives in mind.
It’s called:
What to Remember When Waking
and I would add that these are words
both for waking to the new day,
and for waking to a new year:  
You are not
a troubled guest
on this earth,
you are not
an accident
amidst other accidents
you were invited
from another and greater
night
than the one
from which
you have just emerged.

Now, looking through
the slanting light
of the morning
window toward
 the mountain
 presence
of everything
that can be,
what urgency
calls you to your
one love?  What shape
waits in the seed
of you to grow
and spread
its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees
beyond the house?
In the life
you can imagine
for yourself?
In the open
and lovely
white page
on the waiting desk?

The Universalist Church
West Hartford, Connecticut
January 4, 2009