Every Day a New Year

Today feels like any other day. It's a day. The last day of the year. I'm not celebrating. I'm not reflecting or looking back. What's the point? It's time to walk tall, to not look back, to move forward, to be present on this day, and the next and the next. As a logical, over thinker who analyzes everything, it's time stop thinking about all of it and just do it. I'm not intending for this to be a Nike commercial, I'm just fed up with chewing on something for too long and being unhappy about choices I've made. It's time to stop judging those choices. If something doesn't work, I choose something else. If something works, I follow that route and build on it.

New Year's is the time of year we shake off the dust and cobwebs from the previous year and Spring Clean our lives. People take time to reflect on the previous 364 days, learn from them and make changes. They mull over their failures and successes and promise to do better next time. They make resolutions for self-improvement. They celebrate. Each year they do the same thing in one big cycle. Depending on the person, they set themselves up for more failures or new successes, and each year they rinse, recycle, repeat.

Everything in this world is cyclical: the tides, life, sleep patterns, planetary evolution, the seasons, the year. In ancient times in the Western World, people celebrated the Winter Solstice as the new year, the time when days would finally start getting longer and the farming season would begin anew. Eastern cultures viewed the time between the solstice and their calendars' end as a time of struggle between Chaos and Order or as the reversal of order. This article articulates well the different celebrations.

However it was and continues to be celebrated, New Year's is the most widely celebrated holiday across our globe. I won't be celebrating tonight. I won't be celebrating New Year's because I'll be celebrating my life. I'll be doing something new with new friends and moving forward into whatever is next. I'll still raise a glass at the midnight hour, but today is like yesterday as it will be tomorrow. It's a new day, and I'll be doing versus thinking. I'll be living versus reflecting. And tomorrow I will do the same.