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“A New Year Begins: with a Triumph of HOPE”

Desmond Tutu said:
“HOPE is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness.”
In this New Year, throughout many cultures – individuals take time out to pause and review, replenish, rejuvenate and re-purpose their personal and professional lives. I’ve found that in the New Year, I am more reflective over the year that has just past.
With each turn of the calendar year, I find myself experiencing a sense of HOPE.
“Hope”, as Aristotle said – “is a waking dream.”
And so each January I seem to slip into my own new dream and bring a full measure of renewed HOPE with me into the new calendar pages ahead.
When I reflect back up my past year – it can look dismal at certain points in time.  Fires, floods, famines, fear and utter foolishness seems to appear everywhere. It appears dismal indeed.  But then I read what Barack Obama wrote:  “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with HOPE, you will fill yourself with HOPE.”  I believe former President Obama affirms what the Dalai Lama XIV believed:  “No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.”
And so my year begins.  I will get up and do something I’ve never done before – to make something happen that I‘ve always wanted to happen.  Whatever the target action is – it will be revealed to me as to what to do and when to do it - this brings me HOPE and accomplishes HOPE out into the world.  This is what the New Year will bring to me – to us all – HOPE fulfilled.

Rev. Kate Huddelson, Palliative Care Chaplain, Stony Brook Hospital - 2019

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