New Year's Day

I was in bed by 9:30 last night, scribbling on a legal pad and reading a book by Martin Dugard. Occasionally, fireworks would explode in the distance. Midnight found me sound asleep. We used to have neighbors whose tradition was to welcome the new year by marching outside their house - and around ours - beating pots and pans. They are now doing that a few streets away.

In general, I am a New Year's grinch. The significance of changing a date on the calendar escapes me. There is, however, one aspect of the holiday that is inescapable: Its illustration of time's speed. Only the young think that time moves slowly. For the rest of us, it does not merely fly, it rockets past. In 2010, I found that months went by like weeks. My biological clock sensed that Christmas arrived at the time normally reserved for Halloween.

The changing of the year also provides an opportunity not for resolutions - those recipes for disappointment - but for reassessment. I've written earlier of Emma K. "Ma" Herrick, an extraordinary woman I knew years ago, who would use the new year to write down what she'd learned about life. Judging from my observations, she'd learned a great deal. I regret that I never got the chance to read her journals.

Ma Herrick's tradition could be a good one to adopt. Future generations of relatives might find them to be helpful, but the larger benefit may come when our periodic reviews remind us of lessons we once knew, but have forgotten.

So much of life is not a revelation. It is a reminder.