Happy New Year!

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What?  Happy New Year?  Yes, this is how I always feel when a new school year begins.  As a long time teacher, I still love the opening of school, the anticipation of a new year ahead, new faces, new ideas, a new season.    It always feels more like a new year than January first!   This is a time of endings and beginnings, a goodbye to summer and hello to autumn – change is in the air.  It’s a good time to ask myself what changes I need to make, to see what needs to be renewed in me as this year moves forward.   I’m very good at prolonging a project.  How often I say to myself, “I’m going to read that book (or article or website or…) soon” and then realize how long it has been ignored.  Or I realize how I promised someone who was temporarily in a rehab center that I’d be over to visit soon – only to discover those days have passed and she’s been discharged.  This new term, new season, new week asks only one thing of us – pay attention!  Don’t wait!  Reboot!  Renew!

Priscilla Wood, OP
Dubuque, IA

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