Happy New Year! Though the library is still closed for the New Year, we wanted to share with you this inspiring article reprinted in the ever-festive January 13th, 1922 issue of the Chatham Record
NEW YEAR day flies the flag of hope. Many of us come to the close of the year with a sense of defeat. We have failed to accomplish what we had hoped. Events have shaped themselves against us, and we have lacked the power to stem the tide. The good resolutions with which we so bravely started soon went lame and dropped out. Thus many of us find the shadows of disappointment, discouragement and failure falling around us as the old year closes. What is the use of struggling longer? We are fated to disaster.
Then New Year day dawns and something is saying: “Try again.” There is ozone in the air. Events begin to wear a different outline. Voices are calling. Hands beckon us on. And as we lift our eyes to face the future, yonder on the sky line flies the flag of hope.
This is what New Year day would do for you and me. It would put ginger and punch into our sapped and fading vitality. It would help us to stand on our feet and look the world fearlessly in the face and carry on. It would shout in our ears: “Forward! March!”
Some cynic may say it will be the old story again, but success is on the road to meet the man who tries. It is a glorious thing to put up a fight, even if you seem to lose. We are not lost because we fail, but because we decline to attempt.
The page of yesterday is a stained page, blurred by our tears and blotted with failure, but the page of tomorrow is white and clean. The New Year is saying that you may do better. Grandly begin!
– Dr. James I. Vance, in Springfield (Ill.) Journal
The library will reopen tomorrow, January 3rd, at 9 A.M., so come out and see us. Make using the library your New Year’s Resolution! We’ll be waiting to help you out every step of the way.
