stag party

There is an old Kyrgyz legend that if you see a stag on the first day of the new year, the year will smile on you.

Well, I saw a stag yesterday morning, and that is close enough for me. I am going to claim the prize -- leaving out the inconvenient truth that I do not have a drop of Kyrgyz blood in me. But it is a cultural appropriation world in which we live.

No one can know the future, but I do know that last year was about as good as a year could be. If you had told me fifteen years ago I would be living in Mexico and thoroughly enjoying life, I would have laughed.

Well, not about the "enjoying life" part. I have always done that. But back then, I would have imagined retirement life in London or Paris. I made a far wiser choice.

And I have my health. That is not something to sniff at now that I have entered my eighth decade. For that, I can thank genes far more than my lifestyle choices. At almost 92, my mother is still a force of nature and living on her own.

In looking at the world around me, there are a lot of things I wish were different. But even those concerns have seeds of hope. There is too much material poverty in the world. Since 1990 the worldwide extreme poverty rate of 36% has been reduced to 10% and is within reach of being eliminated. Unfortunately, Mexico's extreme poverty rate (along with the rate in other Latin American countries) has increased over the past decade.

As individuals, there is a limited amount that we can do to change macroeconomics. But, as moral agents, we make choices daily that affect the people around us.

When confronted with some human activity that may annoy us, we can either be kind and act as a social balm or we can allow our baser natures to enflame the situation. Too often, I choose the latter course. If I would like this year to be as good as the last, I can work on that.

I hate new year's resolutions. By labeling what we should be doing in our lives as "resolutions," we are admitting that eventually we will just keep acting as we have in the past.

So, let me simply wish all of you a blessed 2020. We can work on it together.

And may that stag next December have another point on his rack.