You know what I associate best with New Year?
A steaming cup of coffee.
Not the expensive one you get at a Cafe; Nor the cheap instant coffee from the grocery. Freshly brewed coffee, with the percolator spewing the last few drops of water on the coffee beans holder. I just love the aroma that slowly fills the house. And yeah, it’s best to drink freshly brewed coffee in the comforts of our home!
And what does coffee remind me of?
Of friends, conversations, and relationships; of times spent thinking of many things–hopes and plans and dreaming for the future. And coffee has been with me amid the frustrations that life sometimes brings.
So, it’s quite possible for me, like the poet T.S. Eliot, to measure out my life with coffee spoons:
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?- from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T.S. Eliot
The New Year brings all sorts of things, some people lose fingers or get hurt because of firecrackers. For others, they experience the Post-Christmas-season-poverty-syndrome because they splurged money on Noche Buena and Media Noche, and with the coming of the New Year, they’re hard-pressed to wait for the next payday.
And still for some folks, the New Year is nothing but “more-of-the-same”, they’ve given up hope that the new year will bring something good. Whether it’s the status of their relationship or their finances, an illness or a lingering anxiety; it’s easy to lose hope even with the New Year upon us.
But take heart, like the energy jolt that coffee gives us every morning, the New Year is a pretty good excuse to start changing, to start something you haven’t tried before. If people ask you why you’re trying something new, you can always say: “it’s the New Year, I can try something new.” 
By the way, I don’t believe in New Years’ Resolutions. I’d rather believe in quarterly goals. They can be implemented more realistically, and measured easily. At the end of the quarter, you’ve either completed those goals or not.
Forget about horoscope, or whatever animal (Chinese or whatnot) you can find in the encyclopedia. Here’s a promise we can always rely on:
“He who sits on the throne said: ‘Behold, I am making all things new. ‘”
(Revelation 21:5, NASB)
Yeah, freshly brewed coffee, optional.
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