I hate New Year’s Resolutions. The turn of the new year, in general, seems to be overrated. The beginning of a new year should not be the excuse we need to lose weight, quit a nasty habit, or start being better, more educated, more appreciative, kinder people. Let 2017 be the year you quit waiting until the first of January to improve your life.
Bob Goff, an incredible writer, speaker, and human, claims to quit something every Thursday. Seems like a big commitment but there’s something to take away from that kind of routine. Each week, day, hour, or minute, we do or say something we wish we hadn’t— we curse, we oversleep, we gossip, we are unkind to ourselves, we take our fragile lives for granted. And quitting all those tiny, easy bad habits all at once seems like a lot of hard work that it isn’t very realistic to do just because the year is beginning again. Take those things, week by week, day by day, hour by hour, and stat quitting a little at a time. January 1st means a lot less when you’ve been working on being your best for each of the last 365 days.
Better yet, let’s stop limiting ourselves to quitting or changing. Read more, call and visit home more, take more time to yourself. And resolve to keep all the parts of yourself that make you so good already. Keep making people laugh, keep singing, keep being honest. The person you were in the last year or ten is not a waste just because you have a different vision of what being good looks like. You have been good, you are still good, and maintaining what has made you so great is worth doing.
“New year, new you” doesn’t have to be your motto because you are already phenomenal. There will be highs and lows, things you wish you did differently, people you wish still called like they used to, but there’s no proverbial leaf that is turned over at midnight that will turn you into whatever idealized version of you that exists only in your mind.
In 2017, resolve to remember:
you are already great
life is only as good as you make it, everyday
the bad moments are as fleeting as the good ones— decide which ones to remember
you can have as many new beginnings as you want
you do not have to wait until the start of a new year to do something differently
Live the rest of your days like each day is a new chance to begin, to make the grand and vast world (and your own simple piece of it) wonderful.
