It’s probably a little out of character for someone who is not much into parties and gets anxious in crowds to enjoy celebrating New Years, but I do. Even though I’m not terribly good at the socializing end of the holiday (and I’m especially not good at making small talk while standing in high heels with my stomach sucked in), I love being with a group of people when the clock strikes midnight.

You see, sometimes I feel like such a screw-up. Over the past year, I haven’t gotten in shape, haven’t finished my book, haven’t organized my anything. There are so many things I haven’t done that I intended to do.

With yet another year of I-should’ves and wish-I-would’ves behind me and no way to get that time back, it seems to make total sense to celebrate the end of an unproductive year and the promise of a new one with a group of people who are, more likely than not, just as screwed up as me. 

Sometimes when my daughter messes up, she pauses, holds up one finger and says, “Do over.” It’s like she rewinds, erases, then starts over again. 

That’s how I see New Years. Worldwide Do-Over Day.

It’s a time to stop and consider what to change and improve, a time when so much seems possible that there’s something enchanting about it.

My husband, who is self-employed, keeps a large dry erase board next to our bed. On the left side of the board, Geoff tracks hours spent on various clients. On the right side is his to-do list. For some reason, one of our cats took a look at Geoff’s slick board and decided it would be a good place to sharpen his claws. Before I could stop him, his rapid swipes managed to erase nearly every To-Do. I thought Geoff would be annoyed with the cat, but he wasn’t at all. He said so much of his list had remained unchanged for so long it was getting him down, and now–violá!–it was gone.

I’m going to try to treat New Year that way. My To-Do list is erased, along with my unwritten-but-might-as-well-have-been-etched-in-stone list of the many ways I’ve let myself down this past year. I need a break. 

Syndicated columnist Ellen Goodman once wrote, “We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives, not looking for flaws, but for potential.”

I don’t need a list to know what needs done. What I need is to focus more on being satisfied with some stuff just as it is and paying attention to the things that suddenly give me energy, that pique my interest and hold it. The things I lose myself in.

So this year, when the clock strikes midnight at the New Year’s party we’re attending, along with the noisemakers and fireworks and glasses clinking together will be the sound of one former screw-up happily announcing, “Do Over!”    

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 10:08 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.