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Yes, I am drawn to the drama of endings and beginnings. This time of year has always pushed me into the web of introspection. My age took center stage last year and it felt like a stew on a slow simmer. I would periodically realize my age and be shocked by the math. I think it has taken this last year to get used to it and here I am.

I am carrying this library of experience in my memory and it is incredibly extensive. Now, it seems when I am asked a question or put into a new circumstance, I have this warehouse of history, providing me with the tools to navigate the unfamiliar. It feels like I can dig deep inside and find resonance with more than ever before. At the same time, I realize there is still so much to learn.

We are all blessed with wonderful eyesight that tends to just look out, but I now find I see myself more than ever before. I can be daydreaming with youthful eyes, lost in flights of fancy, just like a kid. Suddenly, i totally connect with the person behind those eyes and I am catapulted back into the present. Sometimes, I feel like I have super powers, because I know shit. Believe me, I am not talking about wisdom, a term I don’t care for. I have made many miscalculations when it comes to people and situations, an integral part of my life long education.

When you are young, you wonder what it will feel like to be 18 or 21 and if you are way back in the single digits, it’s unimaginable. I have lived through all those milestone numbers that many of you are still conjuring, distant concepts without much relevance. I have been around myself a long time and something about it has made me feel like I am breathing slightly different air than the majority of you. It is incredibly sobering, but I confess to loving the feeling. It is like being able to go to the cashier of your memory, getting some chips you can put into play anytime, under any circumstance.

When old people talk to old people, invariably, health and medication are bound to be the topics of conversation. Personally, i think about that crap enough and I don’t want it taking up any more space. My God, there are so many things to talk about, other than hips and knees and dicks. I want to talk with everyone else and my contemporaries are also welcome.

I look forward to this year. I know there was a lot about last year that was very dark for so many. I never imagined my country being so far off course, its soul tarred and feathered by opportunists, driven by greed, stealing America from all of us. We are living in the ultimate Reality TV Show, an entire country main lining trivia into its veins. Today, what people wear is more important than their accomplishments. If you don’t agree with something, it is fake. The most powerful person in the world is an impetuous dunce, living his life in the mirror of self-adulation. He is a tool of the monied interests, unwittingly doing their bidding and starving the rest of us.

The World According to Trump is not one I want to inhabit. Last year was incredibly upsetting to me. A coup has been simmering for decades in America and money finally took the throne of power, where we now have a naked Little Emperor doing their bidding. At times, it seemed like a nightmare and it still does. I felt so uncomfortable and I know it fed into my excessive bleakness regarding the remainder of my residence on the planet.

In this new year, I am going to grow into the idea that life is not like our calendar. It is not linear and doesn’t begin and end with an electric ball hitting its mark. I have looked to the end with a kind of frightened nihilism, the curtain falls and there is silence and darkness forever. In this year just ended, something began to slip into my consciousness. I have lived so much of my life out there on a limb and have put my faith into the hands of some kind of power way beyond my abillity to fathom.

Back in the mid Eighties, I was winding down nearly ten years of therapy, which took up most of my Thirties. I started gravitating to a more spiritual approach to my life and came to believe I was a shepherd and poet, who lived several thousand years ago in the desert hill country wherever Jews clustered. Since then, I have allowed worry a seat at the table and it has to leave because magic needs that chair back.

I am looking forward to this year. It is time for all of us to think about the future and the world we want for our children and grandchildren. What are the lessons we want them to learn? Who will set the example for them? It is up to us to do this work because there is no one else to count on. In that regard, I think there are some surprises in store for all. As for me, I am going to dig deeper into my Path, one that appreciates this life and believes in the one that follows.