DON'T THROW AWAY THAT 2011 CALENDAR. NOT JUST YET

Time is a fragile thing. Poets, painters and physicists each try to define it. You and I get to live it. But what should we do when it's over? As in that old calendar you just took down from the kitchen wall?

The pragmatists and environmentalists among us will simply say: Dispose it. I say: Study it. Take a little sliver of 2012 time to reconsider what you and I didn't do with 2011 time. It's something like the difference between the tea drinker who throws away the brewed leaves and the one who studies them.

Here's what I see in my 2011 calendar. The days that were used for tasks, appointments, deadlines, family dinners, parties, weddings and funerals. The everyday rhythms of my life that were scheduled and most times kept. But there are other dates! I see them scattered among those now expired hours, never to be regained or re-lived again:

* The days I spent dreading the bad weather that never came
* The days I hated going to a job that now I wish I still had
* The days I canceled attending an event that I now regret missing
* The days I never got around to calling my old friend who never made it to the end of the year
* The days I failed to experience such delicious cliches as: Health is wealth
* The days I didn't have time to look at the lawns and birds and kids just outside my window
* The days I forgot to kiss the ones I love
* The days I forgot to notice how I was aging into someone not just older but different

Well now. Your 2011 calendar will have other days to it. Gone now. Never to be lived again. But this little exercise is not meant to bury your Caesars. Nor to praise them. Simply to hold them up to the light of your best reflections. Some of them may draw a smile, some a tear, many a shrug.

But if held to the light just right...2011 could very well be your very best map for traveling your 2012