So it’s 2010 and as we bid farewell to a tough year, many of us are still worried about what 2010 will bring.  I find it helpful to remember, though, that keeping our attention on the present moment, we are equal to whatever life sends our way.  It’s projecting out that gets us into trouble (IMVHO).  That and a mathematical view of life … as in this, from The Writer’s Almanac:

Adding It Up

by Philip Booth

My mind’s eye opens before
the light gets up. I
lie awake in the small dark,
figuring payments, or how
to scrape paint; I count
rich women I didn’t marry.
I measure bicycle miles
I pedaled last Thursday
to take off weight; I give some
passing thought to the point
that if I hadn’t turned poet
I might well be some other
sort of accountant. Before
the sun reports its own weather
my mind is openly at it:
I chart my annual rainfall,
or how I’ll plant seed if
I live to be fifty. I look up
words like “bilateral symmetry”
in my mind’s dictionary; I consider
the bivalve mollusk, re-pick
last summer’s mussels on Condon Point,
preview the next red tide, and
hold my breath: I listen hard
to how my heart valves are doing.
I try not to get going
too early: bladder permitting,
I mean to stay in bed until six;
I think in spirals, building
horizon pyramids, yielding to
no man’s flag but my own.
I think a lot of Saul Steinberg:
I play touch football on one leg,
I seesaw on the old cliff, trying
to balance things out: job,
wife, children, myself.
My mind’s eye opens before
my body is ready for its
first duty: cleaning up after
an old-maid Basset in heat.
That, too, I inventory:
the Puritan strain will out,
even at six a.m.; sun or no sun,
I’m Puritan to the bone, down to
the marrow and then some:
if I’m not sorry I worry,
if I can’t worry I count.

So it’s 1/1/10 – very like the address of the house where I grew up.  As I enter a new decade, this feels appropriate somehow – a knitting together of past and present in an alchemy that (one hopes) leads to some species of wisdom.  (Lately it has been leading to crankiness, but that is a short-lived phenomenon, I’m positive!)

Here’s to good health, personal evolution, and lots of belly laughs along the way!

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it. Andre Gide