Tuesday, January 02, 2007
Happy New Year!!!!
Yesterday morning I was thinking about my New Years resolutions. Like most people mine consisted of exercising more, eating right, and doing all the things that I know I should have done last year. What makes the New Year holiday so special is that it is just that: a NEW year.
A gift I received this holiday season was a Simpsons calendar. The very first picture is of Homer booting Grandpa (dressed as a representation of last year) out of the house while Maggie (dressed as this year) watches near by. This image of the New Year as a baby is a pretty common one. It’s nice to think that every year we get a chance to wipe the slate clean and start over as though we were a new born. New Year’s resolutions are our efforts to take advantage of this new beginning and strive to be better this year than we were last year.
The unfortunate truth is that these efforts we make are so often short lived. I realized yesterday, as I was thinking of my resolutions, that I had been planning them for at least the entire month of December. The promise of a new beginning, a clean slate, was so tempting, that I put off my self-improvements for a whole month simply because I needed an arbitrary green light to get going.
Right now, as I write this, it is 11:25 and 47 seconds, on the morning of January 2, 2007. The New Year holiday is special because it’s the big odometer of our lives switching from 99,999 to 100,000 yet it is really no different from 11:25 and 47 seconds. My meaning is that every moment is unique, every moment is here once and then gone, every moment has the potential to begin anew.
So after all this I decided that my new years resolution should be this: if I know there is something that I can do to make my life or the lives of others even a fraction better, I’m going to use this moment to make it happen. I don’t need a special holiday to begin again, right now is important enough to take the risks I know I should take and to be the person I want to be.
Happy New Year, everyone!!
All of us here at Choices 4 Youth
A gift I received this holiday season was a Simpsons calendar. The very first picture is of Homer booting Grandpa (dressed as a representation of last year) out of the house while Maggie (dressed as this year) watches near by. This image of the New Year as a baby is a pretty common one. It’s nice to think that every year we get a chance to wipe the slate clean and start over as though we were a new born. New Year’s resolutions are our efforts to take advantage of this new beginning and strive to be better this year than we were last year.
The unfortunate truth is that these efforts we make are so often short lived. I realized yesterday, as I was thinking of my resolutions, that I had been planning them for at least the entire month of December. The promise of a new beginning, a clean slate, was so tempting, that I put off my self-improvements for a whole month simply because I needed an arbitrary green light to get going.
Right now, as I write this, it is 11:25 and 47 seconds, on the morning of January 2, 2007. The New Year holiday is special because it’s the big odometer of our lives switching from 99,999 to 100,000 yet it is really no different from 11:25 and 47 seconds. My meaning is that every moment is unique, every moment is here once and then gone, every moment has the potential to begin anew.
So after all this I decided that my new years resolution should be this: if I know there is something that I can do to make my life or the lives of others even a fraction better, I’m going to use this moment to make it happen. I don’t need a special holiday to begin again, right now is important enough to take the risks I know I should take and to be the person I want to be.
Happy New Year, everyone!!
All of us here at Choices 4 Youth
