New year resolutions and coconut diamonds

So 2013 has arrived in exploding fountains of expensive fireworks and a living room littered with streams of coloured  paper from all the poppers pulled by my niece and nephew. And this morning we greeted the new year, as we do every year, with traditional Sri Lankan kiribath: diamonds of coconut rice eaten with your fingers

New Year's Day is always a strange day.  Too full of looking back to be simply look forward.  As an old year ends and a new one begins, I find the last year kaleidoscoping in my head, mixing the forgotten with the remembered in a swirl of disorganised pictures and emotions.  And then the countdown reaches zero and  and for a whisper of a second, we stand astride two years, one foot planted firmly in the unchangeable past and the other trembling with potential in the unknown future. And for that tiny moment anything  seems possible! And then the clock strikes 12 and the fireworks begin and it is tomorrow and a new year has begun.

New year's resolutions are not easy.  The older you get, the harder it is to think of anything new to resolve on or to convince yourself, for more than a minute, that you will actually keep them.  I am wondering if writing them in a blog, putting them into undeletable  cyberspace , will make me try harder to keep them.  So here they are:  eat less chocolate, take up running, be a better mum, put the laundry away, work less,  day-dream more,  stop throwing slugs over the fence into the neighbour's garden.

 And, since it is still only new year's day, I am still full of hopeful optimism that I might at least manage some of them.

So here's to a happy, healthy 2013 filled with friendship, laughter, adventure and the odd day of sunshine.