First, allow me to pass along thoughts of a peaceful and prosperous new year. That said, I’m not sure why it’s called a new year and only on the first day of January…, unless you happen to be Chinese.
Try as I might, it still seems like any other day. It’s a new day and any day one wakes up can be considered a new start on life. Don’t you think? Morning breaks and it is an opportunity to make completely different choices than one was making just before falling asleep last night. Each day presents that to us no matter what weekday, month or year it happens to be.
My only resolve this new year is the same resolve I took up just recently. It’s my new mantra and a perfect cure for what ails you if you happen to be dissatisfied with whatever is going on in your life. CHANGE EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING CHANGES!
The approach of the new year did get me to thinking, taking stock if you will, of my life and physical, emotional and mental state. I would not hesitate to guess that many of you are doing the same.
The impetus seems to be the constant barrage of lists and remembrances of the year just passed. There’s the ‘best of’, the ‘worst of’, the ‘most embarassing’, the ‘funniest’, the ‘most outrageous’ and perhaps worst of all, the list of all the famous people who died last year. (Just once I’d like to see a list of people who were noteworthy to the people around them yet without a single speck of fame or popular recognition.) These lists and reminders get you to thinking about the past year, where it went and how you spent it. Sometimes that can be downright depressing.
So I suppose the new year gives us a kind of ‘clean slate’. We shake the Etch-a-Sketch of 2013 and move on to the squeaky clean new year of 2014 with a renewed sense of goals, dreams and ambitions. For some reason beyond my comprehension, all the obstacles and distractions of 2013 are somehow, and ever so temporarily, removed from our thoughts. It looks like a new road up ahead.
I’ve decided my New Year’s resolution for 2014 is to not make any resolutions for the new year. (It goes along with that ‘change everything’ philosophy.) If you’re changing everything and everything is changing there’s not much need to resolve anything else.
I wrote a book about a year ago that I sometimes forget to take to heart. It’s titled Live Your Life In A Crap Free Zone. It’s a humorous, dry-witted look at many aspects of life and the myriad choices we make in that life. I forget to take my own advice about the choices we make everyday. I forget that we always have the option every day, regardless of the approach of a new year, to choose differently today, the day we wake up.
One of my choices that has changed is the idea of giving my work away. I confess that, as an author, I was not pleased with the thought of giving away books I toiled over and published. After all, we all wish to be compensated for that which we produce, especially if we are making a living, as they call it.
Nevertheless, just before the new year, I decided to take my prized collection of short stories, Shorts and Other Laundry, and make it available to readers everywhere for free.You can get your free digital copy no matter what form of reader you use. I thank you for being a reader, for without readers, writers would be writing to themselves.
Good fortune to you in the coming new year. EH
Image 1 courtesy of happy2014newyear.com
Image 2 courtesy of allcountries.org
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