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Walking past Virginia Tech's Lane Stadium on my way to work on a foggy morning the week before Christmas, there was a steady stream of well-dressed people heading to the fall graduation ceremonies. I wasn't as snappily dressed, but this was the path I always take when I walk to work. As I crossed Washington Street, I overheard a member of a cheerful group surrounding their graduate say, "The best place on earth is the Virginia Tech campus!" Another adds, "The happiest!"

It was a gray day, at the tail end of a difficult year, but I knew those people were exactly right, at least for them, at that moment in time.

It's amazing how life can simultaneously be as fragile as one of those shining glass balls on your Christmas tree and as resilient as the Blue Ridge Mountains that surround us. Virginia Tech has had some trying times, but students keep graduating, and the community continues to find it a wonderful place to be.

This year has borne some hard times for my family and friends. I lost my uncle, John Anderson, and an old, old friend, David Mull. It's bad enough to lose someone even when it's expected, after he's been through a painful illness. It's shocking to unexpectedly lose someone in his 40s, someone you went to high school with, without ever having a chance to have a last conversation.

In some sort of balance, two sets of friends had children this year and the world has gained the cute and charming Ruby Jean Grubb and John Marcus Philpott.

We have a new Democratic president-elect who won on a promise of change, who is waiting in the wings as the old president frantically passes "midnight regulations" that fly by without any congressional oversight or votes, easing constraints on oil development in the West, cutting Medicaid benefits and reducing Congress' ability to stop logging, mining and drilling for oil and gas on public lands. While struggling to find a bailout for the failing automakers, Bush's team estimates these midnight regulations will have an almost $2 billion yearly impact on the economy.

The national and global economy is in shambles, and Virginia is facing a shortfall of nearly $3 billion and potential layoffs of 1,000 state workers. Pay raises have been canceled again, but I still get to spend a happy afternoon making and decorating Christmas cookies with some of the wonderful women I work with and feel as though I am very fortunate.

While record-breaking crowds are expected in Washington for next month's historic inauguration of the United States' first black president, president-elect Barack Obama is constructing his Cabinet to include fewer women than either George. W. Bush's or Bill Clinton's administrations.

At first, I really wanted to go to the Obama inauguration. I went to the first Clinton inauguration parade; it was very cold and very crowded. Standing by the joyful Lesbian and Gay Band Association performing on the sidelines was a lot of fun, but in some areas along the parade route, there were chain-link fences at the edge of the street, between the crowds and the parade itself. Being squashed in a sea of bodies was a claustrophobic experience -- one I am not inclined to repeat -- especially for an event that is expected to jam transportation and even cellphone services so severely that wireless carriers are spending millions to increase capacity and organizers warn attendees that they should expect to walk for miles. Even the prospect of seeing the LGBA actually get to march in the parade this time isn't enough to give me the courage to brave the cold and the crowds.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander, who wrote "Science, science, science! Everything is beautiful/blown up beneath my glass" in her poem "Venus Hottentot," will be speaking at the inauguration, as will Rick Warren, the evangelical preacher who compares supporting abortion rights to denying the Holocaust.

Instead of braving the crowds and traffic, I may attend the live telecast of the inauguration that multiple groups at Tech have organized, to be shown on campus in the Commonwealth Ballroom in Squires Student Center. Or maybe I will just quietly enjoy the network coverage in my neighborhood pub of choice.

Through the difficult and the smooth, the heartbreaking and the joy-making, every moment we experience is a miracle of coincidence and circumstance. As Emerson writes, "Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens."

Pris Sears lives in Blacksburg and works at Virginia Tech.