Day One

This is the first day of twenty fifteen. I welcomed in the new year flying down the highways of Pennsylvania while driving home to New Hampshire from Michigan. I was supposed to be at the bon fire party of a friend of mine in NH but that was just not meant to be.

Maybe this will be the precursor of the rest of the year. Maybe my plans and schedules will continually fall apart, and maybe I will find myself on more and more overnight roadtrips and unplanned adventures. I wouldn’t really mind that so much.

It seems to me that people begin the new year with expectations and demands, usually in the form of resolutions, which they have no intention of actually working towards or pursuing. There’s nothing wrong with having goals as long as you know that they’re there for you to work towards and not just assume they will come to you. This new year hasn’t started fresh for you to come thundering in with your expectations of what you want out of the year.

Celebrating the new year is about reflecting on what you did right and wrong in the past year, and trying to find ways to do better. It’s about appreciating the things that were good and moving on from the things that were bad. Of course, all this can be done any day of the year, but we arbitrarily choose to do this only on the very first day.

So my only new year’s resolution this year is to remember more often that each day I wake up is a new beginning and that I can turn over a new leaf at any time – that I don’t have to wait for the new year to come around in order to give myself a new sense of direction – I can do that each and every day.