On the last hour of the last day of 2014

Wanted to say more about 2014, meant to post more, say more, do more, but life doesn’t wait. Not for any of us.

So 2014.

What to say about it, that others haven’t said or thought or done…

I guess in a world where everything has been said and done, what matters is how you say it, how you recount those places where you met the world, and what you took from those moments, were hopefully bettered by them.

2014 for many reasons was a good year. For some reasons was a frightening year. And for a good number of reasons was a great year.

2014 for me will always be about Marriage, Travel. Cruise. Bermuda. Bermuda that lonely, spectacular island, 700 miles from anything. Personal things, but it will also be about nightly news buzz words of Haiti and Afghanistan and Venezuela and Ebola and Ferguson that shadowed us all.

It will be about an upstart called SpaceX and the dream of space, VOD and Roku and Netflix and redefining how we consume television and films. And it will be about all of us, in this age of drones, and NSA surveillance, and the ever murkier boundaries of man and machine, holding ever more precious and necessary nostalgic ideas of humanity, and freedom, and caring.

I hope that all of you, however you round out 2014, and round in 2015, know that you are loved and precious, and you spread it on, you have the desire to close out 2014 and storm into 2015, loving and caring and hoping and helping and making others and yourself happy.

Because if we can do this, we win.

We win the only war that matters, the war to be more humane tomorrow than we were yesterday.

God, whatever God you believe in, keep and bless you all, and I’ll see you back here in 2015.

The first year of the 2nd Decade of the 21st Century… IS ENDED!

Closing out the 1st year of the 2nd decade of the 21st century (which is what 2010 was, if you didn’t know) I find myself once again at that odd summing up place:

“I’m an oooooddddddd

And Vicious man but I’m still

Stan Ding

And the dark is all around

But it’s a

Lan Ding”

Copyright 2010-2011

That little refrain of mind sums up me making it through this year. A battle of inches, a grueling ground war, every well-fought over piece of foot forward, weighed against every crushing foot back

A year of successes: Travel some, Publish one, secure peace of hearth, those quiet places internal, discover roots unknown, E & V, Celebrate generational additions, Syd. try hard, steps definite. Lots to celebrate.

But all weighed against this sense of treading water… not well. Of real, personal connections and “opposition to save us from ourselves” always… not quite realized.

Of a whole world of people having conversations about the meaningless, while the meaningful is blown to hell.

An odd,summing up year.

“You’re so filled with inconsolable rage”
— QUANTUM OF SOLACE (Good if flawed movie, but excellent opening title/credit sequence and surprisingly good song by Keys and Black)