Happy New Year!

Starting over, starting fresh, and making big changes

I like New Year’s Day for the same reason I like early mornings and Monday might be my favorite day of the week (now that I don’t work in an office) and I can’t wait until I get to start a fresh journal and I’m addicted to making to-do lists…I love a new beginning. I love starting over.

But the reality is that there aren’t new beginning, not really. You can make as many resolutions as you want to, you can pretend that you’ve got a blank slate, but we can’t get rid of the sins of our past by simply closing our eyes.

Beginnings are arbitrary. Is there anything that different from 12/31/2025 to 1/1/2026? You could just make up a new beginning whenever you felt like it, couldn’t you? You could just start over totally at random, so what’s the point?

Maybe that is the point. You can start over whenever you want. You can lament the way things have been and celebrate the way things could and should be at any time.

Hope, and, more importantly redemption. I’m sure everyone experienced their fair share of hardship in 2025. A new year won’t fix all of our problems. But it’s another year. We made it. You made it.

You can start over at any point. You can redeem yourself whenever you want. Not because you’re running away from something, but because you see the future just a little bit in the distance. All you have to do is reach—