Happy New Year

I started this blog in December of 2013. I have now kept it for just over one year. There were good points and bad, high points and low. Thank you so much, readers, for coming to my blog. Overall, it's been an enormously valuable learning experience. 

My goals for 2015 are a little different. I am still a neophyte, to be sure, but I want my focus to be on doing rather than writing and thinking. I want to focus on incorporating religious and philosophical practices into my life--as a regular part of life--not as things that are external to ordinary life, that are held up in the air, observed from afar and intellectualized--not as things additional to daily life, but rather as things that are part of life in the same way that making dinner or going to work or exercising are parts of life.

To that end, I hope to apply Stoic thought more consistently and regularly. I will try to keep a Stoic journal--a private one--in a real notebook, not in an online blog. I hope to follow the Roman calendar for the whole year with regard to holidays, and also to do religious practices each day for the whole year. I hope to do rituals as properly as possible and to expand my reading of source material. I will try to learn more Latin, and I will try incorporate the new information I learn into my daily practices. If I can't achieve these goals with absolute, perfect consistency, that will be okay. One way to fail is to let the perfect kill the good. 

The thing about the future is--it's not ours to see. It's outside our control. Because of that, hope is a dangerous thing, to the extent that it causes us to feel miserable when reality doesn't meet our expectations. And reality sure has a way of doing that. Nonetheless, whatever happens, we live in a charmingly beautiful world. To be able to experience it--the passage of the seasons, the changing patterns of clouds, the choice we have at any moment to try and make those around us happy--among many, many other things--these are truly pleasures. With those thoughts in mind, I wish you a happy, lovely, and successful 2015.