“Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go. They merely determine where you start.” Nido Qubein
There are lots of different traditions related to ringing in the New Year. For my family when I was young, it was snack foods at 11:00PM then a 30 second countdown to midnight followed by wishing each other a happy new year then off to bed. As young married adults my wife and I followed a similar pattern, or may have participated in small informal parties. For many years we hosted a small New Year’s party for the people in our church home group. In our neighborhood, traditions to mark the change have been parties, fireworks, banging pans and playing musical instruments at midnight. Our son’s friend would play his trombone on the hour. I’m sure that you have memorable traditions that have helped you welcome the new year.
“Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It’s perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we’ve learned something from yesterday.” John Wayne
One tradition for most people is to make New Year’s resolutions. The likes of these are too numerous to list. I did that for a number of years, but finally resolved (?!) to give up New Year’s resolutions about twenty years ago. It is the only one I’ve been able to keep. What I found was a pattern where I made a resolution, failed it in a few weeks, then waited the rest of the year for a chance to start again. Finally it seemed better to adopt the (perhaps somewhat cheesy) philosophy ‘today is the first day of the rest of your life’ and try to keep focused on the moment. It makes successes seem more triumphant and failures easier to recover from. More importantly it keeps me trying. I’m no longer shamed by failure and I’m humbled by successes. It’s like stepping on the scale every morning. Some days it’s up, some days it’s down, but I work to keep the trend going in the right direction.
It also seems good to take some time to examine the events and activities of the previous twelve months. A little self-assessment is helpful to determine what mistakes we’d like to avoid and allow us the opportunity to think about what we might like to accomplish in the next year. It can help us sort out our vulnerabilities and prejudices, but can also help encourage us with places we’ve grown or strengthened.
Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” While the case can be made that any life is God-given and therefore worth living, the point is that as humans, introspection and examination facilitates personal growth. If all we do is eat, sleep, work and repeat, we are behaving like little more than animals. Self-examination helps us be more completely human, purposeful and filled with meaning. Take a little time this New Years to celebrate surviving the year, for sure, but also time to reflect. You’ll likely find some successes, places to improve and reasons for gratitude. I’m believing that you’ll come away with a new sense of purpose and better able to face the challenges of the upcoming year..
A Blessed and Happy New Year to All!
Random Thoughts 
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