Likelihood of Success

Evening descends on the place

Dec 31, 2007 Heart and spirit, Metropolis

It is the last evening of this turn of the calendar, and it need not have any special significance. But not surprisingly we cannot resist looking back — as, really, we should every day (but this we do resist!) of the year.

At this time last year I was in another place, watching the sunset from another vantage point. It was very pretty from there, but it was not the right place.

I have been in a lot of places. I have had a lot of places. Perhaps this one  is the right place.  (The picture at left is, as the one I link to above was at the time, the late afternoon view from my office window.  The new one overlooks 42nd Street in Manhattan, but barely.)

But of course there are places that are not only identified by zip codes, and these are the places we really are, no matter where our mail goes. I have been a lot of places in 2007, including ones I thought I would never be in again, and ones I never dreamed I’d be in at all. Sometimes I struggle to understand why God — one of Whose Hebrew names, Ha-Makom, best translated as “the Omnipresent,” literally means, “the Place” — has led me to some of them. Undeniably, however, I am far richer not only for having been to them, and out of them, but for this wondering, too.

I am grateful that there has always been a place for me. Some people would do anything to have a place, a real place, of their own tonight, notwithstanding their mindless reveling or pointed pondering. And because of my journeys this year from place to place, my heart is with them, in ways I could never have known.

Perhaps, in fact, this is the answer to not only my wondering, but my wandering.

See you next year.