WillWybrow.com

As many of you will be aware, it’s “two thousand and nine,” now. And whilst I expect that a lot of you see the futility in making “new year’s resolutions,” what you don’t understand is you are guilty of a similar mistake, one which is far more common and far less often noted as fallacious.

Somehow, despite getting out of the habit of deliberately creating new goals and targets that begin on the First of January, we are all still in the mindset that the new year is somehow a “fresh start.” We say things like “here’s to 2009,” or “I hope this year is better than 2008.”

Newsflash: the parts of your life that were shitty at 11:59pm on December 31st, 2008 will be just as shitty at 12:00am on January 1st, 2009. Nothing is magically changed in the ticking of that transitional second. Hoping or expecting 2009 to be a “better year” than 2008 is just as bad as setting resolutions. These are just arbitrarily chosen days; they do not mark that any of your problems are coming to an end, and they do not give you any reason to hope that something in your life is going to change.

All the end of the year does is give you regular markers against which you can evaluate and record your happiness. But why wait until the end of the year to do all that? If you want to see how well you’re doing, always be looking back over what’s happened. Surely a month-by-month reflection is going to help steer you away from your mistakes sooner?

And what if you’ve had a really terrible “year,” up until, say, mid-October? Then even if things start to go really well, most of your year has been spent having a terrible time, and you say it was a “bad year,” – that’s just not accurate enough. It focuses too much on things which you might have dealt with and left in your past, and it just drags you back down like an emotional deadweight.

Nothing stops. And nothing starts. Not without you making the same effort you’d have to at any other time, so why wait to do it? Let every day feel like January the First if you have to, just quit pinning all your hopes on just one of three hundred and sixty-five opportunities.