The truth is, of course, that every moment is a new beginning - the beginning of what comes next - and in every moment is the potential for a fresh start. To embrace this is truly exciting, empowering. At any moment I can choose a different course. It doesn't matter that I haven't exercised that choice until now ... Now, I can. Or now.
No new beginning is more seductive than the New Year. It bursts into life with ever more fireworks and in their colour and energy are painted every kind of dream. Mine are remarkably consistent each year and if I haven't found the way to make them come true quite yet, it is perhaps because I haven't taken my courage firmly in my hands and opened my heart to let them in. The trouble with dreams that you don't take hold of is that they can become the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow.
I have been unravelling the story of my great great aunt Annie. Born in 1854 in an English market town, her mother died of TB when she was ten, and her father, a baker, of a stroke when she was seventeen. Two years later she had taken her courage in her hands and was making a new life for herself on the other side of the world in Australia. Whilst this kind of long haul travel is almost a rite of passage for gap year teenagers now, it wasn't then. A glance at the generation that accompanies her on my family tree shows she was a pioneer. I am struck by her courage. There were other options to survive but she chose to be brave and dared to make her own dream. She also followed her heart; this is a love story too.
New beginnings, at the New Year or any other time, usually contain those two ingredients: courage and love.
Happy New Year.
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