New year dawns - Embrace life as Kerry teen urged
It is by now traditional, and certainly convenient during the holiday news famine, to consider the balance sheet of a year as it enters its last hours, as it goes the way of all flesh. Great issues, economies or revolutions, are checked on a list. Hope is sprinkled liberally on the difficulties that impinge on all our lives and a new sense of optimism is encouraged by the lengthening of the days. The fading of one year can only mean the beginning of another and there are few things as enlivening as a new calendar turned to January.
We all, or at least most of us, try to embrace that uplifting phrase that helped sustain the world’s Jews through their — and humanity’s — darkest hours: “Next year in Jerusalem...” Assessments are made on a grand, sweeping scale. Great lives and achievements — Heaney, Mandela and, despite everything, Thatcher — are remembered and parsed.
