2013 was not supposed to be good.

It wasn’t supposed to be bad, either. To be honest, I just hadn’t been thinking about the future enough to characterize this new year with any sort of prophetic adjective. I actually hadn’t even thought about 2013 until it was here. And what was supposed to be an eventless, forgettable, transitory year snuck up on me. So now, in the wake of all that's happened in 2012, is 2013: the beginning of a new and good thing.

2012 was, in many ways, The End. Pardon the drama, but even objectively, last year held many conclusions. It was the year we put down Annie, our sweet golden retriever; the year I graduated college and said goodbye to the life I had known so familiarly for four years; the year my grandmother passed away. The year was marked by sequences of definitive endings, each with an intensifying permanence.

And so, the new year had involuntarily become a pretty significant turntable, the crease of a new page I had no choice but to begin. It all sounds potentially overbearing and overwhelming. Like I said, 2013 was not supposed to be good.

But thankfully, it is. It is good, it is exciting, it is hopeful, it is beautiful. Because hidden behind the veil of uncertainty of every beginning is the promise of something awesome, transformative, and meaningful. So that’s how I’m choosing to acknowledge 2013. As a beginning that will outweigh my recent endings. Staring into the new year, I’m exhaling safely and excitedly because it's so clear to me that the trajectory of my life really is glory to glory.