Good morning, January 1--

Here in the little northern city by the sea, a thick fog drapes over street and stone. Last week's snow has dwindled to a sugary crust that glows eerily under the misty streetlights, and I glimpse my white cat dash across the street and slither into his best friend's hedge.

Inside, the furnace rumbles and the clock ticks. I've emptied the dishwasher and French-pressed the coffee and scribbled last night's dream memory into my dream book, and now I am sitting on the gray couch, contentedly writing to you, as is my habit, day in and out. This begins my fourteenth year of keeping this barely read record, and every year at this time I wonder if I'll finally fade away into some other preoccupation. But for some reason I haven't yet.

I edited all day yesterday, except for a long midday walk-break with Tom, and then in the evening I made a batch of raspberry-filled cookies, roasted Brussels sprouts, and invented a lemony hake orecchiette that turned out to be a showstopper. (The night before I'd made a perfect French-style pork roast, so I'm feeling pretty smug, kitchen-wise.) Then, after dinner, we drank tea and ate cookies and played Yahtzee and listened to Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies, recorded on New Year's Day in 1970, when I was six and Tom was five and we were sound asleep in twin beds in Rhode Island and Ohio, tucked up with our stuffed animals and our unconsidered futures.

I do not like making New Year's resolutions. They always smack of guilt and other people's expectations: as in I resolve to clean my room more often this year. I resolve to do my math homework before doing my reading homework. I resolve not to keep acquiring kittens.

Nonetheless, the day lends itself to hope. Our public lives are so fraught. Our planet's life is so perilous. But amid the terrors we are still ourselves--private, alone within our silences, but also the pillars under our cottages, but also the roots stretching into our forests . . . these cottages and forests that we paint and prune over the course of what the novelist Brian Doyle calls "the social ramble"--our bumptious, ever-changing interactions with one another.

My hope, for myself and for you: that we rest in the present moment more often than we regret the past or dread the future. And by rest I don't only mean relax. I also mean hover, engage, be. That is how art happens, but it is also how joy happens, how thought happens. I think of the emails and phone calls and conversations I've taken part in this past year: our angsty dissatisfactions, our frustrations with other people who don't seem to tread the same path, our gloomy regrets about what might have been, our self-inflicted wounds, our anxious "I'm not good enough." My hope is that we start this year with none of that. They'll sneak in, those knives, but we don't need to encourage them. Take today as your rehearsal. Smile at yourself in the mirror. Notice your breath fogging the window-glass. Listen to the snowmelt drip from the eaves. Resolve to be.