Acronychal
A New Year Does Not Equal A Clean Slate
Okay, this might sound a bit pessimistic, and I like the idea of a clean slate just as much as everyone else. But the fact is, everything that happened in the previous year is not erased simply because the calendar moved to 1 January (or other day that marks the new year for your particular calendar).
I’m the first to say I’ve been guilty of this on more than one occasion. And it’s an easy thing to fall into. “Last year was awful. I’m so happy to leave it behind and have a new beginning. This year will be different/better/happier/insert appropriate adjective here!” How many times has this crossed your mind as the new year came?
Now I’m not saying that we should all live in the past and focus on all of the terrible things from the previous year. Nor should we focus solely on any of the resolutions we made for the previous year that we couldn’t achieve. My argument is that we should take a look at why we weren’t able to achieve our previous resolutions, and what we can do about it to bring change.
If we do this, we give ourselves a better chance of breaking the cycle of trying to achieve the same resolutions over and over again each year. If you’ve ever thought “Well, I couldn’t do [insert resolution here] last year, but it’s in the past and I’ll forget about it and try again this year,” you know what I’m talking about.
Failing is something to never run from. Some of the greatest success is born from the deepest failures. What is important is to learn from our failures, something we have likely heard all too many times but have not implemented into our lives enough.
Making New Year’s resolutions and simply forgetting about our failures of the previous year does us a disservice. It gives us a false sense that we have a clean slate, when that’s not what we should be taking with us into the new year. We have a slate that is splattered with our achievements and failures; our hopes and dreams; and our moments of sadness and joy from the past year. It is what defines us.
We should not want to erase this slate. We should want to vividly remember it and all the beauty we enjoyed and the failures we endured so we can use them to make ourselves better for the new year and beyond.
