Well, 2023 has come and gone.
All the presents of the festive holiday season were feverishly ripped open with bows and paper cast aside, replaced by the glee of discovering what was hiding inside. What did I get? What did I receive? My most fevered wish must surely be hiding in there…..
Alas, the magic and expectations of the holidays rarely live up to the reality of the actual event, package, or gift. It must be something to do with this time of year. From Thanksgiving to New Year, we just set ourselves up for some measure of inadequacy or disappointment or both. The unrealistic expectations of the season versus the cold dash and clash of reality is nowhere more evident than with our New Year’s resolutions.
We start the new year with such grand intentions; such concrete goals and objectives…only to discover within a few short weeks (or couple of months at most) that the expectation and the reality are miles apart. We’re just simply not the most dedicated or disciplined creatures when it comes to making big changes that are designed to improve our lives and our health. We’re just not. En masse or as individuals, we most often take the path of least resistance, not the path less traveled.
And from this realization, one thing becomes certain: We are designed to be daily creatures of habit, with only intermittent sparks of drastic change; not the other way around. I read once that “people do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures” (that’s a quote courtesy of F.M. Alexander), and I have found this to be a fairly accurate and true assessment of we humans. We choose our habits, our habits choose our friends and our activities, and the rest is a pretty easy picture to paint.
So with the arrival of a new year, we have the opportunity to create some new habits (maybe not big, big changes – just a few small tweaks of old habits would be a great place to start) that might eventually lead to other new opportunities friends and habits that will eventually change and improve our life.
But, so often, we’re totally consumed with the everyday; Consumed with the mundane, the habitual behaviors, that we fail to see the miraculous and life-changing opportunities that are flying past us each and every day.
I liken opportunities to the colorful fireflies you see in the dusk of the day. There are hundreds of flickering lightning bugs flying around in the shadows of dusk – just waiting to find the right host for the night. It is the same with opportunities – there are hundreds of opportunities flying right past you each and every day – you just need to look up from the grindstone to see and catch them as they fly past.
So as the new year begins, and the opportunities of a new year begin to fly past you, take some advice from someone who’s seen the fireflies: Look up, look around, watch for the quick glow – I can promise they are there!
Have a wonderful start to 2024, catch your own firefly and we’ll talk soon!
Natalie
