don't read this weblog if you don't want to know how i really feel about life sometimes.

I have a good feeling about 2011.  I don't know what that means really.  I used to think that these feelings were from the divine, but now I'm not so sure.  I think it could be psychological.  It could be that life has been so ridiculous to me that things could only go up from here.  It could be that 11 has always been my favorite number.  Or it could be a divine premonition. I really don't know how any of that works.  All's I know is that I feel good about 2011.

But Praise wrote that she "hoped in eager anticipation" for what 2010 held.

So do we continue to hope for better, if life just does whatever it wants anyway?

It seems like the only way to keep living well is to keep hoping.  Otherwise I'm letting the inevitability of death determine how I live while I am still given the chance to live.  We've all heard C.S. Lewis's opening line of "A Grief Observed" . . . "No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear."  I agree.  I feel the same way about hope.  No one ever told us that hoping would feel so much like fear.  I feel like there's a big emphasis in today's culture on living without fear.  But the world holds much to fear.  Maybe the point is to do it anyway, while we can't help but fear the worst and choose to hope for the best.  Sometimes reality seems to make a fool out of hope. Yet, as scary as it sounds, I can only move forward if I do so with hope.  I don't even know what I'm hoping for, but maybe we figure that out as we go along.

Maybe I have to keep on figuring out how to live with as much courage and hope as I can hold onto, knowing full well that either the best can happen, or the worst can happen, or something somewhere in between the two.  Egypt is the best that can happen for me right now.  Breathing my last breath would be the worst.

But now I must return to the reason I thought to write these thoughts out in the first place. . .

I have a good feeling about 2011.  

With a camera in one hand and an espresso brewer in the other, let's get this new year going and see what you got for us, O'eleven.