It’s a New Year…

When you say it is.

New Year’s Eve is just two days away and the onus is upon us to make it a good one. It’s a clean slate, a time to start fresh, to honor your commitments to your dreams, your goals, your health. All very nice sentiments to be sure. A resolution seems simply a promise made but never kept to yourself. And that kind of sets us up for failure and a lack of faith, because if we can’t honor our commitements to ourselves, how could anyone else truly make a commitment to us? If we can’t love ourselves enough to follow through on our own promises – how are we worthy of anyone else or how could anyone else love us enough? If we can’t be successful at just these intentions. how could we succeed at anything?

I love and loathe New Years for just these reasons. I love it because it does seem like a clean slate, the promise of excitment, a year stretched before us with the unknown. I dread it because people are never ready. We’ve come off the holidays and everyone was gained a few pounds. We are generally gloomy because the excitment of the end of the year celebrations are over. The days are shorter, the weather colder. We have spent a lot of money and must now pay the piper. We have hosted and attended and are emotionally overwhelmed from all the people-ing. The desire to hibertnate is real. Why on earth would anyone be in the right frame of mind to follow through on a promise they made to themselves?

That’s why I want to point out – the constraints we make are only our own. You can start your “new year” any time you please. One set of 365 days is as good as another. And if you fail to meet whatever goal you wanted to meet on a given day, you need only start your clock again. The important part of it is the intention to do something better and to strive to meet that goal. You can set your own parameters, maybe you want to make a resolution for a month, a day…. even an hour. Sometimes minute by minute is all you have before you start again. That one minute becomes five and then ten and before you know it, a day has gone by.

It goes hand in hand with tasks seeming insurmountable. Start with one small thing and build upon it. The house that needs organizing can start with a drawer. The book you want to write, starts with a few words on a page . The business you are struggling to save, begins with a phone call or a key stroke. The worst thing anyone can do is say no, so you keep going until you hear a yes The health goal you set starts with a small walk around the corner. . Take it a step further every day – just a step – just one more push beyond what you accomplished the day before.

Not to hold on to the Christmas holidays a little longer, but in one of my favorite Christmas cartoons, “Santa Claus is Coming to Town, ” there is a song. “Put one foot in front of the other, and soon you’ll be walking cross the floor. Put one foot in front of the other and soon you’ll be walking out the door.If you want to change your direction, if your time of life is at hand, well, don’t be the rule; be the exception
A good way to start is to stand. “