New Year's Day is another day

We work ourselves up over New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day every year. We debate whether we should have resolutions for the new year or something different. We celebrate late into the night and wake up feeling as if a rare opportunity to begin again has been delivered to us.

It’s an illusion, of course. 1 January is another day like any other. Each morning we have an opportunity to make different decisions, different choices and commit ourselves to a different path. More often than not we make the same choices and walk the same beaten path hoping for something different. As the saying goes, that is pretty much a form of insanity.

When 1 January rolls around, we somehow feel as if it will be different, as if our slate will be wiped clean and we have another opportunity to change things because, on that day, we can set goals, make resolutions or live our dreams.

Why do we wait for 1 January to do that? Why don’t we do that every morning? Heck, why wait for the morning, start now. Make a different choice, envisage a different path and pack some sandwiches for the adventure. Sure, there is something a little magical about the calendar both resetting to Day 1 and, at the same time, carrying us into the next year (I’m particularly glad to see the end of 2013) but what we miss is that we have those opportunities all the time.

We can make a different choice every moment, every day. Waiting for 1 January to make a change in our life is just another form of procrastination. 1 January is another day, just like any other day, when we have another chance to start living a different life.