NEW YEAR'S EVE & RESOLUTIONS

Another year gone. Shit. Where has the time gone? Why does it speed up the older we get? I’m not sure I want to do much reflecting on my year. I’m not sure there would be any point. Like most of us there were some good and bad things. For a start only one of us married our prince and most of us probably didn’t finish our novels, move jobs, homes, lives…..Why do we put ourselves through the agony of trying to change our lives knowing that only about 20% of us will stick to our resolutions?

So here we are again facing the end of another year and all that hope that comes with the start of the New Year. What will we achieve this year I wonder? What regrets will we have that things should be different? and if we do have regrets shouldn’t we somehow try to turn them into opportunities.

I don’t know what resolutions to choose this year. I fluctuate between wanting to save the world and wanting to save myself – which is fairly typical I suspect.

Last year my main resolution was:-

“Kindness in others troubles
Courage in your own”

Then in addition I had:-

Travel more
Eat less
Become a lesbian
Write a book
Move to Australia
Make more use of London
Visit my Grandmother more
Have a facelift
Hair extensions?
Get married.

The year before that I had written a list out that had been sabotaged by post it notes:-

So. I still want to travel more and ~~drink~~, eat less, not sure the lesbian thing is a good idea, might drop that and maybe most of the others too….

Most of all, after spending a considerable amount of time with a friend of mine wondering whether world peace was more important than inner peace because how do you have one without the other and whether we should become Buddhists, we agreed on something else yesterday. That maybe Buddhism wasn’t for us after all (not because you are not allowed to drink or speak very much and there isn’t a centre near where we live) because perhaps after all we found that internal calm was a little bit dull…..

So this year, I think that my NY’s resolution will simply be to

“LIVE
LAUGH
LOVE”

As much as possible all the time (without hopefully having to resort to internet sites).

I think we should all aim to be as happy as possible and to laugh as much as possible and to have as much fun as you can. It’s not going to be easy, Europe is collapsing around our ears and the rest of the world think it’s time to put Europe in a map and hang it on the wall for posterity. We are all worried about lots of things and having a tough time – so the answer is to just try and enjoy life as much as we can – our partner (if you’re lucky enough to have one), our children (ditto) and our life in general. I’m going to try and stop looking at the negatives and look at all the positives instead. Personally, not being an optimist, but a realist, that isn’t always easy, but I’m going to avoid pessimism. I am going to surround myself with the people I love and hopefully a few who I haven’t met yet who boost and generate ones soul. Which is a good thing, because that means I can still carry on doing all those things that are going to kill me…..because life is just too short to worry about everything else.