I think I am numb to the fact that 2005 is very nearly up. Yet...

I opened the "Resolutions 200_" word.doc I have stored in my computer, and had no trouble at all listing what I want to do with myself this coming year.

I look back at the plans for myself that I made 20th Dec 2004; I've done well by me ain self this year, I think. I slipped on a couple of things, but for the most part, I've followed through on the thoughts I had that night last year.

So, another set of plans, extensions and expansions, in natural progression of the set from last year.

Still, it gets a bit tougher, doesn't it?

Last night I read on the News.Telegraph that a kinsman of mine has gone and died. It hurt to read about it that way, from an on-line newspaper.

Did I hear him say, "Don't take on so, after all, I was 86, and it isn't as if your branch was especially good about keeping up..." He's right, you know.

Still, he was named for my great-grandfather, and it took my breath away to read that he had passed.

"Now is the winter of our discontent..."

If only you knew, as I did, and do. More than you could ever possibly believe, because it is ever so much easier not to know. Eliminates the responsibility, doesn't it? Inconvenience? No problem-disbelieve it; deny it; discredit it; ridicule it; scorn it.

Even unto God himself.

I read a blog from Israel. One of the commenters mentioned that it was a 'first-night-of-Hanukkah-miracle' that the bombs didn't kill any of the children in the kindergarten where the bombs fell. The next to comment scorned the miracle, and additionally complained that he was sick of everyone claiming this that or the other as yet another miracle.

I wanted to comment to these fine young people that when a person stops seeing/believing in miracles, miracles cease to happen for that person. And that is awful, because miracles inspire such hope!

Who wants to be hopeless? I understand being realistic, pragmatic, even, but hopeless? By choice? HUH? GadZooks what a dry life that would be-eesh!

I wanted to go on, that to try to deride another's belief in the miraculous nature of an event is to try to crush their faith in miracles, and that is a great wrongness, to spread your discontent by ripping the wings off of butterflies.

I wanted to conclude that the nation that feeds on itself (by stripping all the hope from the citizen's lives-a wicked sort of vampirism really) eventually starves to death-look at Russia and Germany.

But I didn't. I wish I had, but I felt that I had stumbled into a private conversation, and shouldn't be too forward with my comments. These are young people, I told myself, and they will be like young people every where-very little patience with (what I hope is) elder wisdom.

What do you think?