New Year, New Choices
The New Year brings new choices
The end of the year is here. What do you desire for 2020?
For far too many people I know, 2019 was an awful year. Whether it was deeply personal matters, health issues, family problems, or the impact of the numerous awful actions on the part of the government, this year was rough.
We are about to hit 2020, a year that brings us to the beginning of a new decade. Also, you’re going to see a whole lot of references to the 1920s and fashions of that time, flappers, and so on. Hell, I’m attending a “Roaring 20’s” themed New Years’ party myself.
The upside is that the New Year represents an opportunity. You can decide if you will approach it in fear and concern, or in excitement and possibility. Do you see problems or opportunities? Trials or challenges?
Of course, things are going to happen that will be way out of your control. For example, the election in November is going to be particularly impactful, but that’s 11+ months ahead. People will enter and leave your life, some by choice and others not so much. There is a whole lot of unknowns you can’t predict or do anything about.
Focus on that, and you will probably find the coming New Year none-too-different from this year. Why not, instead, focus on the potential of the New Year to make new choices?
Life is always a matter of choices
Every single day you make choices. Some are big, but the majority are small. Yet they are still choices.
Get up with your alarm or hit snooze? Shower in the morning, after work, or not at all? Eat a cereal bar or oatmeal for breakfast? Leave for work at 7:15 or 7:20? Wear the green shirt or the blue? And this can all happen inside the first hour or less that you have been awake on any given day.
Sure, most of those choices won’t impact your life in the grand scheme of things. Or will they? If for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, who’s to say what the simple choice could lead to?
For example, you choose the blue shirt rather than the green shirt. Waiting in line for a coffee, a famous film director, envisioning a character in a blue shirt sees you, and it hits. They have to have you in their new film! All of a sudden, you go from your regular day to getting swept up into a big Hollywood production and a fabulous acting career.
Yes, I know, that’s totally far-fetched. But it’s not utterly outside of the realm of possibility, either.
The point here is that even the little choices you make can be impactful in unexpected ways. Thus, if you have made certain similar choices day in and day out, why not use the New Year to make new choices?
Sure, I can think of all kinds of reasons not to. However, I can think of even more reasons to choose new and differently.
If you are dissatisfied with your life, and you wish to change any aspect of it, you have to make choices to do so. Great or small, choices are the key. Using the New Year as the impetus to make new choices is not a bad notion in the slightest.
Choose your actions
Back when 2012 began the New Year, I did something different. I made a New Years’ Action. Not a resolution, an action. I decided upon a thing I would do and did it.
It was not a resolution, nor some undefined idea to be tried or attempted – but an action to be taken. New Year, new choices, and I choose to start blogging every week. That would lead me to where I am now, blogging daily. I made a new choice and took a new action to go with it.
Mindfulness is awareness of thought, feeling, and action. Specifically your own. Since you have no power or control over anyone other than yourself this is important to acknowledge.
From here, you can see how the only person who can choose what is best for you, and that which you desire, is you. There is nobody else who can do that for you, just like nobody else can feel your feelings, think your thoughts, or enact your actions.
It is up to you do decide if you will simply mark the new calendar year with a celebration, then continue as you have…or with the New Year, make new choices.
If you are not living life as you most desire to, why not take advantage of the opportunity and choose anew?
Goodbye, 2019 – don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. Hello 2020, what can we do together to rock this?
Making new choices isn’t hard, but it does require action
Knowing that you can take advantage of the New Year by deciding to make new choices, if you desire to change, why not go for it? When you take action you are practicing mindfulness, which can help build greater positivity and choose new and better choices for your life, which ultimately empowers you. When you feel empowered, your mindfulness increases, you become more aware overall, and that tends to spread to other people around you.
As such, you can build more positive feelings and discover more reasons to feel positivity and gratitude. That can be the impetus to improve many aspects of your life for the better, generating even more gratitude.
Gratitude leads to happiness. Happiness leads to love. Love is the ultimate positive attitude. An attitude of gratitude is an attitude of positivity that begets even more good energies – and that, like you, is always worthwhile.
This is the three-hundred-eighth entry of my Positivity series. It is my hope these weekly messages might help spread positive energies for everyone. Feel free to share, re-blog and spread the positivity.
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