On this new year's day, it's difficult to feel too hopeful about anything. Yet we begin each year summoning up (or simulating?) a fresh stock of hope and enthusiasm, somehow believing (for the moment at least) that the passage of time will change things, and change them in some dramatically positive way. In addition, we have collectively bought into the myth that it is necessary to celebrate this particular turning of time, one more routine passage of day into night, one more rotation of the earth around its axis. We suspend reason for a while, we throw ourselves into frenzied celebrations, and if we happen to find ourselves without plans (OMG as my daughters might say) we feel somehow cheated and deprived, quite out of the social loop. So where do we find ourselves--as individuals, as members of family groups, as parts of an organization or other collective, as citizens of a country--this year? Even if we can count ourselves as happy, fulfilled and at peace with ourselves an
making sense of the everyday