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New Year's Eve, New Life's Eve
It’s the end of the year as we know it! It’s a time when many of us buy into Thoreau’s assertion that “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” Desiring to elevate our lives, we make resolutions to help us do it. I've said it before, but I think it's great that we have a holiday dedicated not only to getting together and partying with friends, but also to taking some time for introspection and change. Although people are largely creatures of habit and there's something very comfortable and comforting about routines, I think we also often want change of one sort or another in our lives. We want life to be better--or at least different--every so often, and this is so much a part of human nature that we've enshrined it in a holiday.
Perhaps we should celebrate every month, or every week, or every day this way, because every moment of our lives can be a new beginning if we choose to make it so. A lot of people will make resolutions that they won’t keep. They may exercise for a few weeks, or watch what they eat, or be nicer to people or have more sex, or whatever they’ve hit upon to improve their lives, but then they slip up and give up, feeling as though they’ve failed. And perhaps they have, but there’s no ultimate failure until we’re dead, when we move beyond succeeding and failing. And this is good news, because every moment is a new beginning. Nothing in the past is real or binding unless we hold onto it and make it real. If we hold onto our failures, they become real in the present, but if we let them go, we continually have new opportunities to succeed.
All that said, if you want to make a change in your life, it’s important to make realistic goals with a good plan to accomplish it and, preferably, ways to measure progress. It’s also good to remind yourself of your goals daily; if you can keep them in mind, you have a better chance of keeping them day by day. I said before that we're creatures of habit, so often our goal is to replace one habit with another: one we've chosen rather than one we've fallen into.
Happy New Year to you all, and may your conscious endeavors elevate your lives in the coming day, week, month, year, and years.