I was at home, in the gilded glow of our living room. My daughter was near me, warm and giddy, conducting such energy, we jolted when we touched. She is beautiful, I thought, as she held her shallow of cider a brandy glass. She is mine to raise another year. My God, what mercy, what miracle.

I will make myself more worthy of her. I’ll be braver, wake early enough for her to do the things I’ve been doing for her when we’re low on time. She will not be so short-changed. I will not be so enabling. She is four and already it is past time for her to learn that a woman must care for her own body, her own mind, her own desires, her own rest. A woman must learn to stand guard at her own gates. While men sleep, while they wander, here she and other women will be: in a home, at a border, standing on some sacred, secret promise that must be protected. This year, she will read. This year, she will bike. This year, we will understand each other better.

My mother is newly in love and spent the moments immediately following midnight cooing into her cell phone. There are secret things I want this year, as it relates to my relationship with my mother. May I find the words for all those things. May they be given voice and wing.

Nana fell asleep curled into her loveseat, Meghan Trainor stiffly dancing while cheerily singing about a liar on the television in front of her. She is growing older, getting tired, but she’s also still quite spry and in remarkable health. She deserves an unencumbered home, grown folks and small children as visitors rather than residents. I want to be able to move this year, so that the composition of all her rest and noise and quiet will be hers to conduct. We all have our own symphony of self-care, with intricate sections to balance. May ours be less discordant with hers this year. May we all be better attuned.

The ball-drop itself was a blur; I didn’t quite watch. I was snapping photos of the girl, sending texts to friends, recording the moment rather than residing in it. Perhaps there will be less of that this year. I may just close my eyes before crossing all my new thresholds. I may take deep pulls of the scents draping the air. It’s important, isn’t it, to be able to say in the moment, This is how the world smelled before your life changed: of yeast, of urine, of garlic, of leaves.

I couldn’t have missed it, I’ll be able to say this year, in the recounting. It was all so distinct.

After midnight, I read a novel and wrote a friend to say: I see you and I love you and I care. This is the person I most want to be: one who exhorts, one who senses whorls of magic around her and reaches out to pull others into its path. I do not want to go alone. If I am meant to progress this slowly, I want all of us — as many as can — to go together. It’s my hope that in practicing these parts of my purpose as my first acts of 2015, the balance of this year will be spent bearing witness to beauty, wishing its regenerative breath upon others, being better to myself and to others than I often believe that I am.

Our pasts lay like salt slicks behind us, bitter, and hard and preservative. They’ve been lived, taken down to our souls, given residence. Now we must leave them behind. Even the lessons. Even they should be revisited sparingly. Neither our failures nor our victories are intended to be caressed as regularly as rosaries. We are meant to make all things new. We are meant to love, not by rote and not from the root of some bygone memory, but by virtue of what is happening right now. We cannot place old emotion into the casks of our newly resolute hearts. We cannot revive the life that’s been laid to rest.

All we can do, granted the rarity and wonder of another year, is spend it awake — to our flaws, as well as to our particular strengths and powers. All we can do, given the grace of a 2015, is find whoever may need us and determine whether it is best to deny them or draw them near. This is a year for divining, for being as perceptive as possible. It is a year to grow strategic and wise. What you’ve needed is nigh, if you’ll learn where to look, far nearer than when you first believed.