On December 31st we get together with our family and friends, we toast champagne and throw confetti and count down the seconds to the end of 2016. When the clock gets to zero and the cheers erupt it feels like nothing physically changes besides us accidentally writing the wrong year on our papers for a few weeks and angrily scribbling it out each time.
That’s my favorite part. It’s so subtle, it’s a great big celebration for us to wake up on the first day of the new year and have it feel like any other day. But the calendar now says 2017 and you have 365 new days to be a better person. I want to be a better person, I want to accept change, I want to be healthier, I want to be happier.
The new year and new year’s resolutions have a very cheesy stigma attached to them because of all the people who buy a gym membership and go for about a week, or everyone who aims for a 4.0 but ends up writing that important paper in an hour the night before, or when I was in 4th grade I swore on my life I was going to learn how to do double dutch because of that Disney movie with Corbin Bleu and I didn’t even own a jump rope. But who cares because why would we ever look down upon something that is allowing us to better ourselves.
We make a list of resolutions with the idea that we have to achieve all of them or else we failed. It’s okay to not achieve all of them because we change throughout the year and maybe what we thought we needed on January first isn’t what we truly need come August or September.
Maybe you want to lose weight but a few months pass and you decide you’re happy with your body. Maybe you want straight A’s but start to realize that what’s important is what you learn and get out of each class rather than the percentage on the final transcript. Maybe you believe you should remove certain people from your life but in six months you are forgiving.
Believe in your resolutions, get caught up in the cheesiness of new year’s eve and the new year, pop confetti, count down as loud as you can but know that this isn’t your only new beginning. Know that you can make a change and make resolutions any day of the year. Every single day is your new beginning. I love the start of a new year and that feeling that this is it, this is where I can begin again. But what I love even more is that you can also do that every single day.
There is such a hidden comfort in the start of a new year, and there is such a hidden comfort in the start of a new day. Happy 2017 and may every single day be your new beginning.
