Whatever you are doing when the New Year starts is how the rest of your year will go.
Until about my mid-20s, I believed this so strongly that I did some rather strange things on New Year’s Eve.
I’d spend the days leading up to and the day of New Year’s Eve frantically cleaning the house because if I started a new year with a mess, the rest of the year would go like that… whether it was a mess of my house or of life in general.
Whatever I was doing when the clock struck midnight: it better be doing something I wanted to be doing and with people I wanted in my life. Otherwise, symbolically, my whole year would be filled with having to do things that made me miserable and people I didn’t want to be around.
I’m not really sure where this superstition came from. Maybe some obscure book I read as a kid or a movie I watched….
But in any case, I believed it.
However life was going at the stroke of midnight at the start of the new year was setting the tone for the next 365 days so I better make sure I had all my plans set in motion for the changes I wanted to see in my life.
Isn’t that ridiculous?
It took a few years in a row of everything getting flipped turned upside down(singing that Fresh Prince style) from how I thought it would go to make me realize just how ridiculous that was.
Because things can change at any moment.
Sometimes it’s in a really good way and other times in a way that has me hiding underneath a blanket and screaming and crying into my pillow.
We had lots of changes around here in 2016, most (whether good or bad) I didn’t see coming as soon as the New Year began. It was an…. interesting year. Full of wonderful moments, but definitely with its challenges, but it’s led my family to where we are now, which is a pretty good spot. With a big change coming next month that I swore just a few years ago I never, ever wanted to do, but that now I’m excited about.
All this to say that while this is a traditional time of year to take stock, reflect, and set goals for the year ahead- go ahead if that’s what you want to do.
But just remember that how these next few weeks go doesn’t determine how the whole year will go. You might decide you want different goals and changes that what you think you do right now.
Or maybe you really do want to reach those goals, but life happens, and you get way off track. You don’t have to wait until it’s the New Year again to try again. None of this new year, new you stuff… you can be a new you whenever you decide you want to be.