Trails of Smoke

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Happy New Year!

First off, let me wish all who read this a splendid new 365. May all your wildest dreams come true. I wouldn't say I'm alone in reinforcing that the end of the year brings with it two main things: reflecting on the year past and pondering the year to come. And there are so many ways to do each, the newest of them being that cliche-Instagram-review-video thing. There's so much fun in it all, wondering what the new year will hold I mean, which leads to my next point, the fun of fireworks.

I took my first venture to a fireworks shop this week and checked out all that was in store for us (pun intended). Then, as we were playing with sparklers on New Year's Eve, I noticed something I'd never noticed before; something I noticed based on the fact that I'm getting older and wiser and more mature, or that sparklers get more boring the older you get. Probably the latter.

I was flipping and flailing around my sparkler in the fashion of an EKG monitor and realized that those sparklers are kind of like the lives we lead. We leave a trail in our lives similar to the lasting smoke of a sparkler, and when you flip a sparkler up and down quite rapidly, you leave yourself a series of smoke parallel to mountain peaks and valleys. There are some points in our life when we're low, and of course those when we're higher (one of mine being this time last year when I was still coming down off of Clemson's thrilling NYE walk-off win in the Chick-fil-a Bowl). Every event in our life stays with us for a time, just like the wavering smoke, and then it leaves us. In a different fashion, one might like to draw a name in the air with the smoke of a sparkler, and those images stay fresher in mind, not unlike certain life events whether good or bad.

The spark that produces those trails of smoke can be related to our life as well. We're engmatic, excitable creatures. We like to be enthusiastic and cheerful, and in this new social age, share that exuberance with the globe.

So be a spark of life in 2014. What kind of smoke trail will the new year leave you with? Hopefully one with lots of high peaks and fewer low valleys. But if there are those lower moments, face them nobly, and be ready for the next high moment, ready enough to attack it with a BANG!

Cheers.

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