New Years: The Date is Arbitrary

It’s funny, the hype around the new year. The planning, preparing, anticipating that comes right before this transition can obviously be attributed to the opportunity for a fresh start, a blank slate for us to create our lives in a way that resonates with us. But when you get down to the nitty gritty, December 31^st at midnight is just another time, on another day, not different from every other day. I’m not writing this from a place of disregard for the excitement the new year brings, I’m writing from a place of reflection because I know that I too have been mindlessly motivated by the date changing, only to remain stagnant after some time passes.

The preoccupation with goal setting and new years resolutions is one of the most perfect examples of how we as human beings are so focused on the future that we entirely miss out on the present, we don’t even see the potential of RIGHT NOW. It’s almost as if from the day after boxing day until the new year, those days become a write-off, they don’t even exist because we’re just waiting for the completion of this year to take place, so we can be who we want to be at the start of 2019. If that is the mentality we continue to subscribe to, our hopes and plans for each coming year will never survive past a month or two at maximum, because they are not planted from a place of passion. Rather they are hoped for from a place of anticipated pleasure, and a fear of living a life unchanged. Because let’s be honest, the changes we imagine in our mind are based on our desire to feel specific feelings, not about any physical changes or material gains. Whether we hope to buy a new fancy car, or lose 20 pounds, we are fantasizing about how we will feel once this possibly becomes our reality, and that is our underlying motivational factor. If we are not conscious of the fact that how we are living right now is based on our choices, our presence and our commitment to growth, or lack thereof, we will live off of a short high of anticipation into the new year, which will slowly die back down into our old habits and ways of being, because comfort zone are easier to sustain. This is the ultimate truth behind all the new years resolution weight loss jokes or the statistics that show most of us give up by part-way through February, because their hopes and dreams created in their mind were not grounded in an analysis of self, and how we currently show up in our lives as free agents.

Instead of waiting for an arbitrary date, what we can we do today, and every single day when we wake up that aligns with how we want to feel in this world. How can we commit to showing up for the people we love? What can we promise yourself ourselves we will prioritize in relation to our self-love? What habits can we start developing in our lives on any given day that will bring us closer to the life we are seeking? It doesn’t matter if it’s July 10^th, October 20^th, or December 31^st, we have the agency to decide that how we are currently showing up in our lives is not in alignment with our deepest being, and CHOOSE to show up differently. This opportunity can be scary though- it requires work. The frightening, deep, conscious work that demands us to look at our lives through an honest lens to reflect on where we are in our own way. This might manifest in our lives as clinging to expired relationships that are no longer healthy for us, or maybe it manifests in other forms of self-sabotage such as addiction or cheating. Every experience of our entire lives has layered upon the previous ones to create who we seem to be today and how we view the world, our circumstances and our opportunities. If we mess up one day, or two days, or 20 days, we can always choose to begin again tomorrow, because the date does not matter, only our whole-hearted intention does. This may sound like a fantasy blog, like “oh yeah that sounds nice but how can I actually show up like that?”. Well, we choose to, again and again, failure after failure, until it becomes how we show up automatically. We carve out the time to self-reflect, to journal, to focus on manifesting what we want to create in our lives and we also focus on being honest about some of the reasons why what we think we are seeking is not showing up for us. The law of attraction is not only about imagining what we want, because almost immediately after we imagine these things we remember that we do not currently have them. So although we may believe your energy is directed towards attracting what we desire, the energy we are putting out there comes from a place of lack-of, fear and that is the opposite of what you are seeking. Commitment to leveling up takes patience, time and often painful awakenings but once we see this life for what it is we simply cannot accept complacency anymore.

So I invite you as we enter a new year to get really clear and specific about what you want to create, but from a place of self-reflection and honesty. I invite you to keep choosing every morning when you wake up to show up how you want to show up, even after the first few months of 2019 have passed. Like the title says, the date as arbitrary. Your blank slate begins any moment you decide it does, how will you create your life?