New Years Eve is a night surrounded by friends, parties and drinking. It is a day where anything is possible. You are crossing the finish line, and it is time to let loose. New Years Eve soon turns into New Years day. Since New Years marks the start of a calendar year, there is no bigger day for “a fresh start”than New Years Day. People tend to use the day to set out new goals and decide on how they are going to spend the next 365 days improving something in life. Most of those changes aim to make that person better, and no one is more supportive than the people around them. It is no coincidence this is also known as hangover day, because what better time to think about being better than being slammed by a major headache.
When I was younger, I often thought of personal changes as an introduction to a new chapter(think fiction) in life.Personal change was a huge event, one marked by all the pomp and circumstance that usually comes with a chapter in fiction. With the new challenge there are new villains. New heroes come save the day and old ones die out. It would all be very exciting and it would always start with an idea. “Today I am a new person.”
And then the cycle begins. We sign up for the gym, we set the alarm clock, and we buy all the books we could ever read. We are going from a pleasure-seeking dilettante to a studious monk, hardening our resolve, mind and body to a complete person. And it works for one day, and another, and maybe even another. We are starting to learn our favorite machine at the gym, understanding the levity in War and Peace, and enjoying the sunrise at the crack of dawn. Life is good and stays good, until we miss a day. The train for changes stops cold.
The miss, especially for me, comes to represent a stopping point because after dropping those tasks once,I can’t find myself in the mood to start over again. It is as if I dropped a deck of playing cards and to play 52 pickup. I never play 52 pickup, I simply wander to another game. More things start to fall apart, and it becomes easier and easier to let things go. Soon you are in July and you don’t even remember what the resolutions were. It just becomes easier to look forward to December 31st.
It seems like it would be easier just to think smaller.
From the desk of Adam Thomas 