Are you charging into the new year with a list of resolutions and the resolve to stay on top of them and change your life forever, or at least for the days you have left?
Another new calendar year actually means one year fewer for you to enjoy. The clock is running out. Despite pre-Christmas prognostications that the world would end in a dramatic finale, it doesn鈥檛 look like the universe intends to go out anytime soon.
Did anyone else feel a little tug of self-indulgent hope that something transformative and fantastic would happen to the world right in the middle of our own relatively insignificant lives?
Maybe the impulse to see the world as if it were in the final moments of its history stems from some kind of collective but unconscious will to be important.
Who doesn鈥檛 want to be there at a key moment in history? Who doesn鈥檛 want to be at the centre of it all?
Was your New Year鈥檚 Eve celebration a little like that? Drink enough booze in a party atmosphere and everybody finds that brief moment of euphoria where it seems that you鈥檙e at the heart of something perfect.
Ringing in the new year like that sets us up for a bit of a fall though, doesn鈥檛 it? We woke up in the morning and everything was pretty much the same on Jan. 1, 2013 as it was on Dec. 31, 2012.
A changed date on a calendar can鈥檛 mean transformative change in a person because change doesn鈥檛 come from outside of ourselves.
External changes in circumstances are temporary, meaningless events unless accompanied by something coming from inside a person.
If you look at it that way, like the Christmas Grinch鈥檚 cousin, the New Year鈥檚 Eve Troll, it seems like we expect a lot of a date change.
But maybe you鈥檒l make it work for you this year. If you made some resolution to change your life in a transformative way, I wish you all the best.
Commit to a hike in the forest at least once every couple of weeks. Help others; read a book; learn to listen to your inner voice. Maybe reconnect with old friends or distant family. Start writing a journal. Paint a picture.
Whatever you do to mark the start of another new year, keep it simple and keep it personal. Big, dramatic, lights-in-the-sky changes just aren鈥檛 that realistic. A turn of the calendar page should tell you that much.
Counting on big changes is like waiting for the end of the world. The world is constantly ending all around you (It鈥檚 called, 鈥榞etting older鈥�), so all that bother is just a waste of time. Forget about the big changes that tend to be too impersonal to be motivational anyway. Focus on the little things.
Collectively, we鈥檙e one year past where we were this time last year. Has the past year been what you expected it to be? If not, what are you going to do to make the 2013 something a little closer to whatever you have in mind for yourself?
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