‘Tis The Eve

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Saying, a few hours early, “Happy New Year!”

By this year’s last day, I was planning on having created a top-level list of “happenings” over the past twelve months. I would have tried ranking them into categories like good or not-so-much. After thinking about the complexities involved in ranking and labeling, I reconsidered, wondering about what’s different that might capture my attention in 2023. Well, besides the always-important attention to caring for my property, and animals, and sustaining ordinary interests.

Daily in the past year, events roaring into our headlines have stayed as big news. Likely, all is intensified after a couple of years of a focus on avoiding covid and self-isolating. This year’s news has stretched beyond one nation’s social, political, and economic conditions. Worldwide events equally invading international headlines are ongoing concerns.

I’m a news junkie. The year’s headlines and my personal reading interests make me think deeply about current situations involving technology, population, health, and wealth. Technologies informing the world’s population contribute to ever-growing human wants and restlessness. Medical advances that sustain human lives are increasing populations. Wealth centered among a few has created the now powerful few, with many either threatening or creating chaos.

In the new year, I will begin a learning process for enlightenment about why and how our social, political, and economic worlds are evolving as they are today. I will read five classic books representing the history and development of science, the force that has created our modern world. These books were recommended by a science writer for The Economist, a widely respected news magazine:

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales

A Short History of Nearly Everything

The Origin of Species

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

The Periodic Table

I’ll spend most of the next twelve months wading through those books. In the process, they might help me understand better what’s happening and why things are so.

Dear Friends: Have a wonderful New Year’s Eve, and with optimism ahead. Diana