New Every Morning

Image by Alain Audet from Pixabay

As the new year approaches, people all over the world are engaging in rites and rituals that help us let go of what has been and prepare for what it to come. In the United States, many of us are busy drafting resolutions aimed at making our lives in 2025 more fulfilling, more successful, more adventurous, or more joyful than they were in 2024.

This chance to start anew is surely one of the best gifts of the winter holiday season. In celebrating it, it’s easy to forget that we’re actually given the same gift 365 times a year—with the dawn of every new day. Susan Coolidge encourages us to receive this precious gift with appreciation and unwrap with wonder every possibility contained within it.

New Every Morning (excerpt)

by Susan Coolidge (1835-1905)

Every morn is the world made new.
You who are weary of sorrow and sinning,
Here is a beautiful hope for you,—
A hope for me and a hope for you.

All the past things are past and over;
The tasks are done and the tears are shed.
Yesterday’s errors let yesterday cover;
Yesterday’s wounds, which smarted and bled,
Are healed with the healing which night has shed.

Yesterday now is a part of forever,
Bound up in a sheaf, which God holds tight,
With glad days, and sad days, and bad days, which never
Shall visit us more with their bloom and their blight,
Their fulness of sunshine or sorrowful night.

Every day is a fresh beginning;
Listen, my soul, to the glad refrain,
And, spite of old sorrow and older sinning,
And puzzles forecasted and possible pain,
Take heart with the day, and begin again.

From the collection, A Few More Verses (1889)