Because I Can

A new year always brings talk of resolutions. Be a new you, kick the bad habits, set new goals, make a fresh start.  I’ve done it myself. When I was a smoker, the new year was always when I’d push myself that little bit harder to quit. When I didn’t exercise, the new year was always when I found myself forking out for gym membership deals, that invariably fell by the wayside. If December was overindulgence, then January was redemption, a beacon of freshness and good intentions.   A clean slate.  

A resolution is a firm decision to do or not to do something and the practice is thought to originate with the ancient Babylonians, 4,000 years ago. The first recorded celebrations to honour the beginning of a new year, which for them began with the planting of the crops in March, also stem from this period. During a 12-day religious festival, the Babylonians crowned a new king or reaffirmed their allegiance to the reigning king and made promises to the gods to pay debts and return borrowed objects.  In ancient Rome, Caesar established January 1 as the beginning of the new year in honour of Janus, the two-faced god whose spirit was said to reside in doorways and arches. The Romans believed that Janus looked backwards into the past year and forward, into the future and they offered sacrifices and made promises of good behaviour for the coming year.  Since then New Year’s resolutions have evolved to be a mostly secular practice, although many religions still mark the event with prayers and offerings to their God. Nowadays most of us make resolutions only to ourselves, promising to work on some undesirable habit or trait, promising to change and to turn into an improved version of ourselves.

In recent years, the thing I’ve learned about change is that it can happen at any time and in lots of different ways, and more recently, that it’s not always a bad thing. Scary and challenging yes, but there can also be an opportunity for huge learning.  Sometimes we have no control over outcomes.  Illness strikes ourselves or those we love, unemployment hits, relationships breakdown and adulting can be overwhelming.  Often the only way through is by taking time to breathe, minute by minute, hour by hour and one day it won’t be so difficult anymore. We emerge changed, stronger, softer, more appreciative of the good things.  We don’t need a calendar date to say enough, to say start, to say no thank you. We just need the desire and often we just need a little nudge. 

And so, I’m going to take singing lessons, to try and finish the Spanish lessons I started years ago.  I’m going to go to my first opera, to dance around the kitchen more. To love my children that little bit extra and embrace the sometimes chaos that is my life. Not because it’s a new year, but simply because I can.