I am gladly shedding the skin of 2012. Tattered, torn and ripping at the seams, I am itching for a new year’s frock to cast light and hope beams on a calendar’s turned page. I would sum up this past year, the Chinese year of the Dragon, as a time of learning.

Lessons …

People pass on. Even when you know in your heart that she should be the one to beat the odds, life as we know it has an expiration date. Rest in peace, Ivy, you stand remembered.

Dreams come true and you can have the happiest day of your life marrying the man you were born to love.

Great and crappy things happen in the name of business. Do what you must in the name of your company, but behind patents, tax codes, and web domains, are still people with discretionary morals and the free will of right and wrong.

No matter how high you set your family security code, drugs can seep into your household. They vapor right in, stealth-like through the keyhole. Once they are present, the journey back to trust is long and sleepless.

Most things are possible with love and forgiveness. It is the salve called grace that I most need to apply. I sometimes struggle getting it out of the tube.

Lance Armstrong broke my heart.

If you pray for truth and revelation, be prepared for some shit to go down.

Overnight I was not able to see up close. It was not gradual. I got up, looked at my phone and was convinced that some iThingy had reduced my font to 6 pt. It was more of an eye thingy.

I have some righteous friends. They are beautiful, smart and funny and bring great things to my life. They have my back even though they can’t see up close either.

Rich Schlentz and Tom Hardin had the guts to publish books this year. They are making a difference with the power of the pen.

I never stop missing my parents.

My brother Andy is the real kind of family.

If you tell yourself that one person can’t make much of a difference, then you don’t know Nigel Alston.

There are tormented people in the world. Some hurt others; some hurt themselves. Some hurt themselves and others. If theaters, mosques and elementary schools aren’t safe, armed guards won’t make it so.

Great people will join your cause and humble you as you stumble along in vulnerable, honest cluelessness. Laughingly, they call this leadership. It’s exhilarating and scary as hell.

Most days I want everyone in my house to be quiet. When it’s quiet, I want everyone in my house to please come home.

It is really hard not to let negativity drape your spirit. Just listening to the review of this long, dark year with its slander hurtling election and constant drone of bad, bad, bad … I am reminded of the call to persevere.

Lastly, we spent time in 2012 waiting on the world to end. The Mayans with their Oreo-like calendar charted a nice start to what continues to be a mystery. Perhaps waiting on the world to end is as good as waiting on the world to change. If I were Nigel Alston, I wouldn’t wait. I would seize the change. I would be the one.

After the Sandy Hook tragedy, the headmaster at New Garden Friends School sent words of comfort to our school and parent body. The quote he included lies below…

“Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come; that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them. Then you will come to walk cheerfully over the world, answering that of God in everyone.” George Fox, 1624-1691

There are people who can’t walk cheerfully over the world, for the rest of us, the choice is ours.

Namaste. 2013. Namaste.