The most common depiction of the passing of one year and the coming of another is a drawing of a bearded old guy trudging offstage while an all-smiles baby makes his way front and center. There's hope embodied in the metaphor, isn't there - the suggestion that something fresh is replacing something worn out and used up?

That's surely not so bad a way to regard the New Year.

But as we look ahead to a new cycle of seasons, we can look ahead to new opportunities and resolve to make the best of them. It's the promise of tomorrow, or more precisely of a new year, that helps inform our feeling of joy, even if we are simultaneously looking back with warmth on the year that has gone.

If we are looking back with regret, the uplift may be all the stronger.

Maybe, you say, this is a psychological trick we play on ourselves. But it would seem to be more than that, for the reality for many is that we are not necessarily stuck with what may have waylaid us in the past, and that there are doors we can open to better days.

In some places and some times, this reality especially holds, as in America in the early 21st century, a place that remains blessed with high degrees of liberty, equality and prosperity, and an era in which science and technology have given us prospects with ever fewer limits.

After all, it's not out of nothing that holiday traditions come into existence. The human spirit has its needs, one of which is renewal. So when the clock struck the hour of change from 2009 to 2010, ushering in not just a new year but also a new decade, many of us cheered and kissed a loved one.

We may then have reviewed in our minds objectives for the months to come, we may have clothed ourselves in the optimism that is common to America and we likely proved ourselves generous with a wish we offered to all within our hearing: Happy New Year!