Happy New Year!

Today is the last day of the year and the last day of a decade. Everywhere are lists of the best and worst of the last 10 years – the best movies, books, YouTube videos, websites, actors and actresses, food and television shows. Who puts these lists together? Some days I can’t remember the previous 24 hours, let alone the last 10 years. But that’s a function of age, isn’t it?

Thinking about it, though, it might be more a function of how much the average person sees, hears and reads these days. Technology has so greatly increased the amount of information we get on a daily basis that at times it is at overload level. I like that explanation better than the one where I’m getting old and the memory lapse is a “senior moment.”

I can look ahead more easily and 2010 looms large on the horizon. Every year I like to choose a new subject to learn. One year was languages – I chose Italian. (It helped that I was living in Rome.) Another year was cooking – got that down pretty well. I wouldn’t give myself the title of Chef but I can put together some tasty dishes.

This year I’m going for a subject that I deftly evaded as much as possible in school - the physical sciences. It seems like a great topic inasmuch as the environment is a constant source of news, and physics is, well, the theme of one of my favorite TV shows, The Big Bang Theory. I hope to get some inkling of what Sheldon is talking about.

I’m starting by reading Einstein, His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. Not light beach reading but perfect for the cold winter days ahead. I want to learn about this man with the brilliant mind.

The book opens – and I’ll close – with a passage from a letter that Albert Einstein wrote to his son Eduard, in 1930:

Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.

And so I shall.

Happy New Year!