The countdown is long over. The champagne is all gone. The crowds have all gone home, some nursing hangovers while the smart ones are not. The parties are over, and the new day dawned with the authority of a whole new year.

What will you do?

Not just today. And not just tomorrow, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to stretch your holiday through Monday this year.

No, the question is bigger, and it’s worthy of being asked and considered when you’re stone-cold sober. What will you do with this year?

Reading this over coffee or lunch or in front of the football games on a lazy Sunday afternoon that also happens to be the first day of a new annum, it might very well seem that there’s no need to worry about answering such a big question. The year is still in its infancy, after all. It takes a while to know how one will make a big impact, how one will make a real difference.

But the days and the months have a way of slipping by, and before we know it, we’re marking Valentine’s Day or the first day of spring or Independence Day or Labor Day or…. And by then the question seems a bit moot. With the year two thirds gone, the big opportunities seem to have disappeared, and there’s Christmas shopping to do and Thanksgiving to plan — and there’s always next year, anyway.

And so the years slip by, and they do so — incomprehensibly — even faster than the months and the days.

And one day, you will be sitting in that chair — or in another one like it — and you’ll find that there’s more time in your past than in your future, more memories forgotten than are likely to be made, and you’ll wonder how you let that question go unanswered for so long.

What will you do? The clock is ticking. Time is slipping away. You can either answer the question with action, or your inaction will be its own answer. You can do something or you can do nothing.

It’s time to decide.