New Year’s Day is the morning of the year. Like the mornings of mere days, it inspires fresh hope but on an immensely grander scale. Each morning we wake, after disappearing in sleep for a split second of eternity, surprised again to find ourselves still here.

Like strong coffee, the discovery is rejuvenating.

Then we reflect that we have once again successfully spun around the earth’s axis; if we’re at a northern latitude somewhere between Santa Fe and Cheyenne, we have traveled 20,000 miles since yesterday, just spinning from day to night and back to day.

We begin to wonder at ourselves and take on small but innocent airs.

When we further reflect that without batting an eye or breaking a sweat, we have rocketed over a million and a half miles in our orbit around the sun since this time a day ago, and that we are now going to start over and perform these same mysteries and miracles again in a mere 24 hours, we become almost tempted to the sin of pride.

We feel that the Frenchman might have stumbled onto something when he counseled that audacity is always the right approach unless it is more audacity that is required.

So it is every New Year’s Day, but on a scale at least 365 times more inspiring. Now we reflect that just in our daily rotations, we have spun over 7,000,000 miles since last year, and in our orbiting, we have sailed an unthinkable 568 million miles through space. Once again, astonishingly and without mishap—leaving aside the odd war, depression, or plague—we have revolved around the sun and come back to where we started to begin anew.

Winter has turned to spring, summer to fall, and back to winter.

This cosmic new beginning inspires no mere quotidian optimism but a kind of Napoleonic ambition. It’s a new year with no mistakes in it. The world is ours to conquer.

Christopher Flannery