Creating a New New Year’s: Leaning into the energy of reflection and resolution
The new year has come again. I have to remind myself that our modern Western concept of New Year’s is just one of many traditions celebrating the renewal of a cycle of time stretching back to around 2000 BCE, and that the date of January 1st wasn’t actually adopted by the majority of the Western world until after 1582, making it relatively new in the long history of New Year’s celebrations. But still, without getting caught up in the details, I believe it’s the intention we give to certain events that creates the actual significance behind them. Does something magical actually happen on earth the second the clock ticks midnight on December 31st? Probably not. In reality, it’s probably just a normal night like the one before and the one before that. The actual magic is in the fact that we all believe it represents something special, and in believing, we make it so.
It is pretty incredible. Our collective intentions and energies shift to welcome a new perspective on the same day every year, and I think we can all feel that change, which is why it prompts us to take action. And so, what action did you take this year? Did you sit down and write some resolutions or goals for 2023? Think about what you want to change? What might make your life better? What’s not serving you anymore? I hope so. I fear that most people don’t take the time to really reflect on how they are living and why their reality looks the way it does.
When there is something in my life that I don’t like, I often ask myself why I’ve gotten to a place where I am allowing it to take hold in my life? Then I keep asking why. Why is it happening? Why is that? Why is that? And Why is that? More often than not, the true answer is because I’m scared of something and my fear has been making me procrastinate making a change, and so I’ve developed habits that seem harmless but are actually enabling the existence of something that doesn’t serve me. As an avoidant person, I have to be really honest when these things pop up, or I will allow them to continue simply so that I don’t have to actually deal with the root cause behind them. It’s a brutal part of the self-discovery process, but one that has allowed me to completely change my reality and become a happier, more authentic person, and I am grateful for it.
New Year’s is a wonderful opportunity to prompt yourself to finally excavate these things from the layers of earth they’ve been buried under all year. I love the hope that New Year’s brings. You imagine your life twelve months from now, after you’ve made the changes you want to implement, and hopefully you see a happier and healthier person waiting there.
My advice, if you are someone who resonates with New Year’s, is to create a quarterly New Year’s celebration for yourself. Find a date every three months and put it in your calendar. Make it a celebration, a night when you order your favorite take-out and put aside chores and work and everything else and carve out a few hours to yourself. Then go through this process. Find whatever method works for you, there are so many templates and advice-givers on the internet for inspiration (I created a FREE template on Notion for this!), but make sure you have a plan to reflect on what has and has not been working for you, why that is, and how you are going to approach it going forward. What changes do you want to make? What habits could help you reach your goals? And always end with what you are grateful for, what you loved, what made you feel true and beautiful and alive. Capture that energy to take with you into the coming months, and you will end up living a much more intentional and fulfilling year. I promise.
New Year’s day may just be some made up construct devised by a Roman Emperor for reasons that don’t make any sense in the 21st century, but that doesn’t matter. We believe in ourselves a little more at New Year’s. We believe in each other, and I think we can all benefit from leaning into that energy and making the decision to use it to help heal and build a better life.
Thank you for reading.
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You can access my FREE Notion Template for Reflecting & Setting Intentions in the New Year (or any time, really) by opening the link, clicking on “Duplicate this template,” and signing into your Notion account where you will find it as a new page on your notion dashboard.
I also made a YouTube video on this topic under my channel, Cry to Dream Again. Go check it out and subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any of my video premieres!
It's New Year's again, and I haves some recommendations for how to begin a practice of reflection and intention setting that will help you actually realize your goals and resolutions this year.