Along with a card/check/letter of encouragement, my mom sent me this for my birthday.  I share it here because I found it so uplifting.

A New Year’s Wish

by Neil Gaiman

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness.  I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can.  May your coming year be a wonderful thing in which you dream both dangerously and outrageously.

I hope that you will make something that didn’t exist before you made it, that you will be loved and you will be liked and you will have people to love and to like in return.  And most importantly, because I think there should be more kindness and more wisdom in the world right now — I hope that you will, when you need to, be wise and that you will always be kind.  And I hope that somewhere in the next year you surprise yourself.

God bless my beautiful, tender, luminous mother.  Tomorrow it will be 52 years since she greeted me at the beginning of this life journey.  How lucky am I to have such a great spirit teaching me to pick myself up, dust myself off, and keep moving.