The same but different.

(From Philippine Daily Inquirer)

AGAIN to begin from the beginning-a yearly ceremony that cannot but be awash in hope. To start on a clean slate, or as close to it as can be possible; to rise to the occasion equipped with a perspective enriched by lessons learned from the past. To look forward with anticipation, eager for what can become, but also to look back with longing and regret. To remember the chances flubbed and the opportunities missed, to intentionally sift from memory and see: the day you did not seize, the words you did not say, the one that got away.

(Like pictures. Francine Prose, writing about the photographs of Diane Arbus, said a picture becoming an icon may not exactly be the most propitious thing to happen to a work of art: "Because when we call something 'iconic,' partly what we mean is that it has become possible to see it without looking. And once we can summon an image from memory, reconstruct it in our minds, interpret it in ways that become convenient substitutions for the image itself, we may lose our motivation to revisit the actual object as often, and to study it as closely, as we should. We stop returning to it for the periodic soundings that it can provide on the subject of how we, and the world around us, have changed with age and maturity, and in the course of time.")

Today is momentous. A mere symbol, of course, a number, you could say, one among many calculated in the human effort to put order in the seeming welter of the days. (You are moved to think of Stonehenge and the mystery of the ancient stones, and to imagine the quite inconceivable task of measuring light shafting from the sullen sky to impale a rock, in order to plot time beyond sunrise and sunset.) But a potent reminder, nevertheless, that it's later than you think.

The first day of the year promises ...