Happy New Day!

Instead of celebrating the arrival of each new year, what if we were to celebrate the arrival of each new day? What if we greeted the arrival of each new day with, “Happy New Day!” and treated each new day, and not just each new year, as a chance to begin again, as a repository of hope, as a wellspring of optimism?

Well, here’s your chance. Because with the arrival of each new day, not just each new year, there comes the promise of yet another opportunity to try to it get it right, whatever the “it” in your life is at the moment. To paraphrase from one of my new favorite books, “The Kite Runner,” “There is another opportunity to be good again.” Because if you look at all of the end-of-the-year in memoriam articles, and if you’re now reading this, the one thing you’ve got over Ike Turner, Benazir Bhutto, Merv Griffin and many others who made the news in 2007 is that, as one person so aptly put it, you woke up on the right side of the dirt this morning.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t have your usual annual goals. Lord knows I have mine, which I’m still putting down on paper. But one of my goals for the year is to not let the perfect get in the way of the good. To take each day as an opportunity to improve on the day before, without too much punishment, or praise for that matter, for yesterday’s performance. Because, IMHO, we women have a tendency to use each new day to punish ourselves for what we didn’t accomplish the day before instead of embracing the new day as yet another opportunity to get it right. And part of embracing that opportunity is actually using it to try to get it right. Otherwise, it’s just another new day. Don’t you think each new day deserves more of your respect than to treat it as just another day? Especially since none of us knows how many of these new days we have in store?

So with that, my entreaty to you this day is to celebrate this day and each and every new day individually. Embrace the opportunity it presents. Acknowledge the hope it brings. Respect it.

Happy New Day, everyone!