The turn of a calendar page to a new year has some sort of psychomagnetic effect on our brain that sucks our thinking into hideous hindsight, feeble foresight and pious promises.
Intellectually we know that the recent past will change in perspective as time passes. Emotionally we cling to every failure as if it will never go away and celebrate our successes in hopes that the up-trend is for real. Reality tells us that this is a waste of mental resources because living in historical pain and pleasure only drags us back into reliving the past.- Although previous attempts at fortune telling have not worked out all that well, we tap into our clairvoyant self to predict events that will happen in the coming year. Part of this prognostication is wishful thinking based on the theory that past successes faithfully predict future happiness and past failures will magically go away. Hmm… could this be another reason not to reflect on last year?
- New Year’s resolutions are a bet with ourselves that we can change the past and future by anteing up our faults and expect that we will be dealt a better hand. Like most games of chance, it is not so much about whether we will lose but how long it will take to lose this time. By the end of a calendar year the promises we made to ourselves in January are long forgotten.
On any day, at any hour, at any minute… we are all capable of assessing our lives and planning for better things. This happens by looking at current priorities in our lives and rearranging them to fit the moment. Since we have the experience of a bunch of yesterdays to teach us the things that work better than some others, we can prioritize things to improve our lot. Since we never know what new events will throw our plans out of kilter, we can plug in new priorities when needed and reassess the others. It is not the planning or promising, but the execution of those priorities that make us successful.
A New Year’s Day is not a significant event in our lives other than we are one day older than we were on New Year’s Eve. If we use that event as motivation to change for the better, at least we have to remember that it isn’t real.
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