Well, 2017 is here. I can’t believe it’s come already, but it has. As always with a new year, we reflect on what the previous year brought us, and look to see the promise of the new one. 2016 sure was pretty tumultuous in terms of world events. It saw Brexit and Trump as well as North Korean nuclear tests, terror attacks, the Rio Olympics and the discovery of the first Ebola vaccine. And for each and every one of us it brought alongside this a new set of challenges, opportunities and memories. Because of this, many people wake up on 1st January and think about how they can best fulfil their expectations for this next chapter of their lives.
It’s only natural, I guess, to think about how we can make the new year better, because better is what we want our experiences to be. It’s almost become a Western societal tradition to do this. Previously, though, I thought that New Year’s resolutions were a bit of an empty promise. I mean, we hear so much from friends and family about how they want to lose weight, want to eat healthier, want to do this, do that. But very few actually achieve what they set out to do, or at least in my experience anyway. So I thought – why should a new calendar year be a catalyst for all this false promise of change? If people wanted to fully commit to a change, then they would put the effort in at the time they felt appropriate. Forget the date! But on New Year’s Eve I was sitting with friends on the grass foreshore watching the fireworks and I thought – no, cut the resolutions some slack. Maybe some people feel obliged to follow the tradition, but others will take the opportunity to forge some personal change. That’s arguably what a fresh start is about, right? I know what aspects of myself I want to work on, so why not seize this changeover to 2017 as a signal to start working on them?
Once I’d decided to make a resolution, though, it wasn’t all set from there. I still saw the prevalent failure of resolutions as a sign that a new year wasn’t reason enough to encourage devoted completion of goals. However, as the days went by, I realised that resolutions are about individual hope. We have hope, and the execution of the steps to fulfil that hope follow. The catalyst can be anything really as long as it’s there. Our responsibility is how we respond, we don’t need to hypothesise about others. It was up to me to make a change, if I wanted to, following on from the hope of the new year.
So, guided or not by resolutions made on sunny (for us Down Under) January days, 2017 will bring to us and to the world a new set of experiences. Resolutions are a choice, I’ve made mine, but either way, may this year be a good one!