“Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” Oprah Winfrey
How do you usually celebrate the New Year? How will you live this year? What changes do you need to make to find what you need?
We usually think of New Year’s Day and its eve as a time for rowdy celebration. Parties, drinking, feasts, balloons, fireworks and parades exhaust us so we arise late on the first day of the year, yawning and worn out, ready for a quiet day.
But this year, many of those gatherings will not take place. We need to keep our distances, wear our masks, and do whatever is safe rather than what is fun. As we make our New Year’s resolutions, we will have to consider the possibilities that the restrictions we live under may continue.
We certainly welcome a new year this year for many reasons, most of all the hope that it will be better. But when there is so much that we have little control over, we have no choice but to take the responsibility to do what we can do to make our lives better.
If we don’t feel good about how we handled things last year, we can evaluate what happened and how we responded and consider a better response for the future. Most of all we need to celebrate what was good about our choices and the way we lived our lives. We should make a list of all the good decisions we made and all the good responses we received.
Hal Borland has said, “Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.” It is experience, after all, that helps us “to get it right.”
Learning From Experience
Over the years, each relationship I was in taught me more about being with a partner. I learned how to communicate what I wanted more clearly. I learned how to be a better listener. I learned what I could tolerate in another person’s behavior and what was intolerable.
These experiences gradually taught me what I really wanted in a relationship. When I finally met the man to whom I am now married, I saw why we would make a good pair. He had the main qualities that I wanted in a partner. The lack of these specific behaviors and attitudes in other relationships had made them impossible to continue. But this loving partnership felt like the one for which I had been searching. After a few years of marriage, it is clear that I did make the right decision.
So as we imagine this next year, let’s make a list of all the experiences we most desire, even if they aren’t practical. Then we can weave through them and begin to live out the ones that are the easiest to experience successfully. This success will strengthen our belief that we can “get it right” this year and give us courage to create a good life. Limitations are only roadblocks we have to discover how to climb over.
May you have the best year ever!
© 2020 Georganne Spruce
AWAKENING TO THE BLESSINGS OF RENEWAL
Awakening to the Dance 
The happiest of new years to you! I absolutely agree that a new year is a continuation of gathering experience. Love that!
I like the idea of another chance to “ get it right”. New year, new opportunities, and as you say, we have learned much from the past to help us.