Ready for the New Year

Sorting and Sifting

Ever stood in the midst of the holiday wreckage and carnage feeling completely sated and then it hits you “The New Year is was just here!!!” Yes, spring cleaning shouldn’t happen until spring, but this week after the New Year rolls in there’s an opportunity for sorting through what happened this year and getting into the new one.

The beginning of the new year is usually when we look back at the year behind us with gratitude and regret and make resolutions on how we’re going to move forward from here, usually by doing things differently. New Year’s resolutions are the butt of a million jokes because we tend to make them so grand and unattainable we can’t hold the course for more than a couple of weeks and then we chuck the entire enterprise, going back to the way we’ve been doing things all along. It’s a weird exercise in futility or in self-validation of our inability to achieve. But it doesn’t have to be.

Most resolutions are just self-abuse. We have no intention of actually succeeding with them, we devise them to seem logical and doable, but they are really like the quest for the Holy Grail . They will take all of our time and attention, require us to let go of our regular lives, and they are unattainable to all but a very few. Of course the inevitable happens. Within a week to a month we have given up on all of it and perhaps even…