Happy New Year!

2012 has been nothing if not eventful. It's been completely, breathtakingly awesome at times--full of those moments, things, and people that unexpectedly change everything and leave you standing (spinning?) in a new place, looking around and trying to get your bearings, smiling like crazy. It's also been really freaking hard at times--relationships have changed, difficult truths have been realized, hurricanes have come and gone (literally, but kind of metaphorically too). As with any other year's end, I'm leaving 2012 slightly shifted. Changed. Evolved. Call it what you like--I'm taking it as a sign of conscious growth.

I'm walking into 2013 a little stronger, wiser, and truer (to both myself and those around me) than I was a year ago. And I'm really happy about that. Because if you're not evolving and changing, you're not really in the arena. I recently read a passage from Theodore Roosevelt's speech "Citizenship in a Republic," delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910. It goes:

"It is not the critic who counts; not the
man who points out how the strong man
stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could
have done them better.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually 
in the arena, whose face is marred by dust
and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly;
who errs, who comes short again and again,

because there is no effort without error
and shortcoming; but who does actually 
strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms,
the great devotions; who spends
himself in a worthy cause;

who at best knows in the end the triumph
of high achievement, and who at the worst, if
he fails, at least fails while daring greatly...."

I love this passage. I found it in Brene Brown's book, Daring Greatly, and I haven't been able to stop reading it. I think if I had to do the whole New Year's resolution thing (something I've never been so into), it would be to try to live my life like that.

Happy new year, guys. Thank you for all your comments, emails, love, and support. Talk to you in 2013. xo