Winter 2010 Edition

So it’s our 3rd New Year together and as I contemplate the year that has passed, and the year that lies ahead of us, one word keeps coming back to my mind: profound.

Its been an arduous year filled with great challenge, many changes and I for one am a profoundly different person than one year ago….are you?

Yes, most of us begin our new year in the same place, hopefully working the same job, facing the same joys and burdens as in the past year, however, it is a profound opportunity and privilege to be able to reflect on all that’s past, to look ahead at all that’s to come, to learn from our mistakes, to right our course, even to renew old routines and, thanks to social networking, reacquaint ourselves with the old relationships that shaped who we’ve become today.

It is profound to see how this community has remained strong, determined to keep tradition alive and well, while embracing the changes that inevitably, life has to offer. Those who continue to “make lemonade out of lemons”, as the saying goes, have shown profound strength and tenacity, in spite of the daily uncertainty, that we have all had to face at some point this year.

It is profoundly reassuring to enjoy the “constants” of living in Ballston Spa…everything from First Fridays to PTA events to our Local Library and more. The Shop Local mindset has become a goal of many around town signaling a profound change in how we are willing to live with one another.

An entire community seems to swim together like a school of fish, turning left, turning right, turning in unison together. Profound.

Here’s wishing all of you a profoundly unique, exciting and prosperous 2010. And for the naysayers who believe the end is near and who are also likely to believe its impossible to gargle with your mouth closed, I say come and meet the neighbors of Ballston Spa and we’ll show you how profoundly wrong you just might be.

Angela McFarland
Publisher