All of us walking on this earth today are allotted only so many years of life.
As one year ends and another is beginning, we all need to take stock of our lives, for a few minutes at least, to figure out what the last year of our lives was about, and what the coming year might turn out to be.
For those who left the earth during 2020, there is no such possibility to be thoughtful about what came before or what might lie ahead.
If you died, you are gone.
Only those who recall your being here in 2020 are pressed to remember the year and its lessons, its trials, and its tribulations. Of course, if you have left the earth and are looking down on us from Heaven, or from other places God apparently provides, we welcome the company. It makes your loss easier to bear, easier to deal with, easier to look back upon, knowing you are heading into eternity in Heaven.
In reality, if you have left us in 2020, you become a postscript to a year that will be recalled for many decades to come, as the year of the pandemic, the year of Donald Trump, the year of racism being thrown in our faces and having to be accounted for.
Those of us who have survived 2020, are now moving on to 2021.
The year in front of us for many millions of Americans is a scary place in time to be entering.
Many who made it through the pandemic and the economic downturn and the upside-down society that has come to be, will not make it through 2021.
None of us really know exactly how the process works, or exactly who will be left standing, except to say, that at the beginning of a New Year, hopefulness tends to abound.
The New Year gives rise, always, to thoughts about a better day, a better life, of dreams for the year, of dreams that might come true.
As 2021 begins, we here at the Everett Leader Herald share that eternal dream of a better life for all of us given the blessing of another year.
2021 is beginning where 2020 left off in March.
The virus and its results remain the big stumbling block as we press forward with 2021.
In the immortal words of the late great British poet Tennyson:
Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true.