Well, here we are once again. The holiday season has passed and everything is beginning to wind down We sit on our couches, pants bursting at the seams from the one extra slice of pie that we shouldn’t have had. We are all left with that all too familiar period of reflection and often self-loathing that comes after the holidays.
It is yet another year gone by, and for a lot of us, it doesn’t feel as if it is enough. The coming of the New Year never leaves us satisfied. It begs the question: are we humans EVER satisfied?
The answer is no. And why should we be? Self-improvement and success come from working hard to achieve what we want, we always have something that we are reaching to obtain. There is absolutely nothing wrong with looking to better yourself, in fact, life is about setting and reaching your goals.
New Years Resolutions are one of the ways in which we justify our need to better ourselves. Gyms become overcrowded. People begin to volunteer more. Some read their Bibles and go to church more. Others seek to say and do kind things to each other and Others attempt to break bad habits. These are all wonderful things, but I must ask myself. Have I ever actually completed my resolution? I know that my fingernails still dread trips to the movie theater.
One paged journals still lie unfinished in my bookshelves. I still have not lost all the weight. It’s a pattern I see not only in myself but in others as well. I implore you; ask yourself if you ever actually completed a resolution? If you have please reach out to me and let me know, I would love to hear of your success. I would love to have my mind changed about resolutions. Please give me some hope that this year I won’t start the cycle all over again.
Another question I beg you to ask yourself is “Why wait?” If you want to change yourself if you want to look at the world differently, why do you wait until January 1st to do it? Why not wake up tomorrow and say that today is the day? It is because you aren’t truly doing it for yourself. Waiting to start something, just allows you more time to screw yourself over in the meantime. You can dream all you want, but if you are willing to wait two days, weeks, or even months, to start bettering yourself do you really want it? I don’t think so.
You can take the time to plan for it, but waiting is only going to give you more time to talk yourself out of it and eventually fail. I know that even though my Pinterest boards are full of bullet journal ideas and workout plans, this phase is only going to last week and I will fall off the horse again.
Why? Because I am telling myself,
“Oh, I’ll wait till the New Year when I have more time.”
News flash! It only gets busier. And to be honest? It’s just because I want to eat all the food and drink all the apple cider on New Years so that I won’t feel guilty the next day because fitness is my New Years Resolution, just like the past five years before that. Guess what, I do it too.
One of the biggest things that I get so tired of seeing is, and I am going to preface by saying that I am guilty of it too.
“Here’s to a better year ahead!” “20__ is my year!” “I failed this year, but the next will be better.” “20__ was the worst year ever. 20__ is going to be the best.”
Guess what.
You will say the same again next year. And the year after that. And every year after that.
I want you to take a second and look at the past year. 2016. Yes, I am still mourning Carrie Fisher, Gene Wilder, David Bowie and every other person on this planet who has left us this year, famous or not. It hurts; it sucks. But I am going to say that everybody dies eventually. In fact, there are 55.3 million deaths per year, unfortunately, many of those taken this year happen to be in the public eye.
Yet we leaving out an important detail about the circle of life. That number is more than doubled by the 134.1 million people who are born every year! While it is important to honor those who have passed and remember them, we must not allow it to overshadow the good parts of our lives. That is the problem with our society! We spend too much time focusing on the bad instead of focusing on the good. While I will forever miss Alan Rickman, I must take the time to realize that this year they made a breakthrough in treatment for the disease that killed him.
Now that they know a possible target, perhaps one-day lung cancer or any kind of cancer will never kill another person. I certainly think that our Potions Master would smile at that idea and we all should too. The great Albus Dumbledore once said, “Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living and above all, pity those who live without love.”
I will dare to extend that quote to hope as well. Who are we without the hope that everything is going to be okay in the end? Dumbledore was on to something! We must learn to love life and whatever it throws at us! Because without it, we are nothing. Sure, you may not be the weight you want to be, your fingernails may not live to see nail polish, but you are here!
The fact that you are alive to fret over these things that you consider to be so terrible about yourself is what you should be celebrating! Hug those curves because they mean that you are still here! You are still alive and there is still a fully functioning heart beating inside of you! That is what matters! Not your visits to the gym. Not your nail salon. Not the election. Not the deaths of people who are no longer suffering or in pain. What matters is that you are here to speak about it.
Make your resolutions, but here is my challenge to you. Take something positive and make a resolution around that. Find something that makes you happy and do it more! Feed your soul! Approach this new year with hope and optimism, that is how you will have your best year ever.
My New Year’s resolution is that I am going to live my life to fullest, I won’t look back, and I will focus on the good rather than the bad that I find in my day to day life. My resolution doesn’t start tomorrow when I wake up, it doesn’t start on January 1st. No. It starts now. It started the minute I began writing this article.
This is when it should start for you. I pray and hope that you will look at the year you just had and make a list of what happened to you, but focus on the good and what you should be thankful for. Make your resolution based on that and start practicing now.
Because you never know, tomorrow may never come and you will have wasted another day waiting to start your next big adventure.
