New Year Resolution is not the New You. It’s the Good Old You!
These last few mornings started as usual weekend mornings, with me being awake way too early, before everybody else, having coffee, super early breakfast and browsing my phone. Except these mornings are January 1st and 2nd, not weekend, and my inbox, Facebook, and Twitter feed are flooded with good wishes and tons of New Year resolutions.
Even if I try to stay out of all that by not answering people because it is still too early and by not reading the titles of New Year resolutions, I literally can’t control the feeling that I need to do something this year too. I can’t control wishing I could do something that would make me happier, better, fitter, healthier, even if I don’t want to. It’s not a special wish, just a usual every-day-yoga/exercise, learning-Dutch and finish-a-course-on-Coursera resolutions. But I already know I don’t want to do it all over again. I’ll try and do the first couple of days into it and then give up, because I am too lazy, too tired, too busy, or whatever. I just do not want to fool myself with it. I shouldn’t.
But it’s hard to stay out of it, when everybody else is doing it (resolutions) and everybody thinks they can give you an advice on what to do, what to promise to yourself, giving tips, lists, tricks… And by the end of January we will all be back to where we have stopped in December. And you know what: that’s ok. Not because we do it over and over again, every year, but because we are not perfect. So, let’s stop here. Let’s do something else. Let’s do something my yoga teacher dragged me into.
Let’s appreciate ourselves. Let’s feel gratitude for what we are and what we have become.
Today, and tomorrow, and every day after that. Let’s appreciate what we have done with our lives, our bodies, our job, our friends, families. Even if we made tons of mistakes, and ate that cake (ok, 3 pieces of that cake) last night, and yelled at our best friend/partner/child a couple of days ago, it’s still ok. We are not perfect. Nobody is. And let’s not even think about other people and their resolutions and successes…or failures. Their failure doesn’t justify your failure. You have to justify it, by simply saying “That’s ok.”
This doesn’t mean you should give up. On the contrary, read that extra book, learn that couple of words of a new language, listen to a couple of classes on Coursera and exercise. But do something even better: indulge yourself. Go for a massage, go out with your friends, eat a cake. When are we going to enjoy our lives if not now? We have, in the end, made it up to this point, built what we are now, and where we are now, no matter the circumstances, other people, weather or the country we are living in. So grab what you have and appreciate it. Then, go from there, with resolutions, challenges, decisions, failures, successes. Because none of these work if you don’t embrace yourself! All the resolutions depend only on what you really are.
Thanks to wonderful Hugh MacLeod for inspiring my days!
The goal of this blog post is to spread the values of self-appreciation and importance of taking care of ourselves, which are going to be embodied in “ME Day” celebration on March 16th, 2015.
