“Champagne Kids” at Taittinger Champagne in Reims, France

As we bid adieu to a turbulent 2021 and say hello yet again to a new beginning, we may have mixed feelings.

I love this photo (above) of French college pals enjoying a champagne holiday. They beam with the carefree abandon of youth. Many things changed in the world they’ve inherited five years hence. Older and wiser now, we share along with them a pandemic-shadowed world that is curbing some celebrations. And dampening hopes.

Still others, young or seasoned, are nevertheless popping the bubbly with a no-holds-barred approach to embracing 2022.

No matter our circumstances, we can certainly enjoy some bubbly—alcoholic or not—as the past smolders in the distance.

We’ve earned it.

One of the beauties of the human spirit is our ability to get up and move on. We may have lost loved ones this past year. We may have had financial problems or health problems or relationship problems. Yet still most of us have endured. We’ve climbed the mountains again and again. No matter whether we got to the top—or only part way there, we still did it.

Near year end, I had the great privilege of visiting Switzerland and enjoying some holiday cheer with family and new friends. Travel is not only an adventure, I feel, but an invigorator. It shows how others live, fall, and rise again. It showcases the magnificence of our planet from ocean depths to snow-decked peaks. In ancient buildings and festivals and traditions, I see the resiliency of humankind as it passes from one generation to the next. I witness the past, the present, and the future unfolding all at once. I feel blessed to be a part of it.

Castles like Chambord in the Loire Valley, France, aren’t just a pile of old stones etched with royal crests. They charmingly endure as visions-made-manifest of someone’s hope and dreams.

I love to wander the old staircases and admire the dusty tapestries and carved furniture of places like this. They speak to me of people who lived and now share their stories with me. Whether we share a common timeline, I firmly believe we share a common desire. A desire to be, to live, and to leave a legacy.

There is hope in enduring. And there can always be joy in celebrating it.

Families on the Montreux, France Santa Train

Nowhere is hope more evident than in the faces of our young ones. They’re so wonderful at staying present with unbridled happiness. At being in the here and now. And reminding the rest of us that life is for loving and living and celebrating. Celebrating the good moments, large or small.

So let’s raise a glass to the future as we gently release the past. Let’s pop a cork to being here. And tip a glass to what is yet to be.

Happy New Year one and all.