Happy New Year... BUT WAIT A MINUTE!

Yogi Berra said many funny things and most conveyed common sense logic, Yogi style. My favorite:  "It ain't over 'til it's over."

While this is the perfect time for new resolutions and a clean slate, let's recognize that the new year is just a fresh start that will be largely forgotten when Dec. 31st rolls around 12 months from now. What really carries meaning in life is not how we start but how we end, do-overs and all.

Sports Illustrated columnist Steve Rushin said something very poignant in his end-of-year piece:

Soccer surely has the best ending, because the end isn't really the end at all, thanks to the stoppage time added on after 90 minutes of regulation. And who wouldn't want that at the end of life, a fourth official at your bedside, holding an electronic signboard with a lit 7, indicating seven years tacked-on to compensate for all the time wasting you did in the previous 90?

It is perhaps for the better that most of us don't receive a two-minute warning, don't really see the end coming, even though we know it's looming, a gateway to the great unknown. So we just let it arrive, both expected and yet catching us unaware, like the end of another column, at the end of another magazine, at the end of another year, beyond which lies a mystery.

I really like that.

So, let's celebrate the heck out of life... our blessing. Let's toast the future and do more this new year that is memorable... like a resolution kept, a kindness shown, a friend made, laughter shared, a burden lightened. The past is done. We've already lived that and we have those memories. But it is the future... the coming year after year where we will spend all the rest of our time. It is waiting to be lived. Let's do it better than ever! We deserve no less.

So in celebration of the past that is already fixed in our history, we sing Auld Lang Syne* written in 1788 by Scottish Poet Robert Burns:

Should old acquaintance be forgot
And never brought to mind
Should all acquaintance be forgot
And auld lang syne

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne

And surely you will buy your cup
And surely I'll buy mine
And we'll take a cup o'kindness yet
For auld lang syne

We too have run around the slopes
And picked the daisies fine
We've londoned many weary foot
Since auld lang syne

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne

We too have paddled in the stream
From morning sun to night
But the seas between us broad have roared
From auld lang syne

For auld lang syne, my dear,
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne
We'll take a cup o'kindness yet
For auld langs syne

*auld lang syne loosely translated means 'for the sake of old times.'

May you all enjoy a blessed New Year!