Full of things that have never been

"And now let us welcome the new year, full of things that have never been,"    Rainer Maria Rilke

He ponders what bedevils me and many others,  Why does life have to be so hard much of the time?  Is it possible that 2007 will suck worse than 2006?    And what does Love have to do with it?

What is required of us is that we love the difficult and learn to deal with it. In the difficult are the friendly forces, the hands that work on us. Right in the difficult we must have our joys, our happiness, our dreams: there against the depth of this background, they stand out, there for the first time we see how beautiful they are.
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Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

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For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.
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Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and uniting with another (for what would a union be of something unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become world for himself for another's sake. It is a great exacting claim upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast things.

From Selected Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke (1960)

Forsaking any resolutions for the New Year,  I expect to ripen more and hope for a late harvest of fine vintage.

A Healthy, Happy and Prosperous New Year everyone