In the new year, hope uplifts us all

By: Mario J. Paredes

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The arrival of a new year is a magnificent opportunity for change, the renewal of unfulfilled promises and resolutions, and for the dreams and goals that power the engine of our personal, family, and societal stories. It is a propitious time to evaluate, change, improve, recompose, reinvent, project, and restart the journey of the path of life with new impetus and renewed motivation.


The arrival of a new year is a propitious time to keep alive the hope for better days. It is a time to accept hope. Perhaps no juncture or moment better symbolizes our hopes for hope than the arrival of a new year. The arrival of a new year symbolizes and celebrates who we are: beings of and in hope. Human beings live because we dream. We are inspired and hope for a better tomorrow than the present. Hope is the engine of human life. Without hope, life would be meaningless and not worth living. And so, while we begin each day full of hope for the best and noblest desires of every human being, our lives pass by, hoping for better times.


It is the hope for a better world that sustains us all. This hope sustains and pushes us every day in who we are and what we do. We are men and women who live hoping for a better tomorrow, and it is this hope that marks our present. Hope for a better humanity refuses to die.


We all know difficult circumstances of all kinds: the personal, family, asocial, national, international, and global hopes of these days in which we live. So never has this hope for the “new” and hope for improvement, change, and renewal been more relevant than at the start of a new year.


Even a very brief review and reading of the panorama of contradictions, inequality, corruption and injustice at all levels and institutions of society and the world challenges and commits us all to give the best of ourselves to make possible the new and better world for which we all yearn.


Faced with reasons for pessimism and sadness, our collective optimism and commitment must rise up to build a better world and society, better families and personal stories, with every decision we make, through our daily activities and tasks, based on better values and ways of interacting with each other.


We all must rethink and ask ourselves every day and with great seriousness and honesty: What is the individual life project we each want for ourselves? What society do we want to build where we, and those who will come after us, want to live? What political system do we yearn for, choose and want for our peoples? What economic system do we want to live in and enjoy every day of the gift of our human existence? And, very importantly, what is the planet we want to inhabit and deliver, with the best possible human living conditions, to future generations?


As we welcome the new year 2023, we invite everyone to work together to make the best dreams that enliven our existence come true and to achieve a nation and world where we can continue to believe, love and hope...


I invite you to build a New Year that is truly NEW because of the NEWNESS of our lives, to build hope amid the reality of hopelessness that challenges us daily. NEW YEAR, NEW LIFE!


Mario J. Paredes is CEO of SOMOS Community Care, a network of 2,500 independent physicians—most of them primary care providers—serving close to a million of New York City’s most vulnerable Medicaid patients.


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