New Year’s Resolutions

By KCY

It’s that time of the year. The time to ring in the New Year. To make New Year’s resolutions.

Some people don’t believe in New Year’s resolutions. They believe you should be making changes all year long and not just on January 1st.

But I don’t see anything wrong with New Year’s resolutions. There’s nothing wrong with having a day where we proclaim the changes we want to make in our life and the goals we want to reach for. Because there’s nothing wrong with wanting to have a fresh start. There’s nothing wrong with hope.

Every year, I secretly write a list of my New Year’s resolutions (I guess it’s no longer going to be a secret!).  Some of them are generic. Get leaner. Eat healthier. Work harder. Make more money.

This year, I’m going to do something different. I’m not going to make New Year’s resolutions. I’m going to make a life resolution.

A life resolution. Yeah, I just made that up, but that’s exactly what I want to do this year. I want to change my life. Most importantly, my perspective.

You see, lately, I’ve been wallowing in self regret. You know, the feeling you get when you wish you made a different decision in life, took a different path. The feeling you get that if you had taken that other road, then everything would’ve been better. You would’ve been skinnier, healthier, happier, richer. I could go on and on for hours. The point is, is that regret makes us think the other path would’ve been the better path, the right path.

We all have regrets. All of us. Even the people who say they regret nothing in life. They’re lying. Because we are all human, and regret is a natural, human emotion.

However, it’s not an emotion we have to allow to take over our lives. It’s not an emotion that needs to take center stage, because ultimately, it can hurt us. It can hurt what we do today and how we treat the people in our lives today. And most importantly, it can prevent us from forgiving ourselves for decisions which perhaps weren’t the best decisions we could’ve made, but were the decisions we made, and that’s okay.

A mouthful, I know, but the point is that I’ve decided this year, I will shift my perspective (notice I said “will” and not “want” because it’s something I will do.). I’m no longer going to live in this regret and allow it to drown me. Today, I’m choosing to recognize that my decisions were my decisions and that I can (and will) live with those decisions. That life is not about looking in the past but looking at today and looking forward. That there are things we can change and things we cannot. That I actually made some pretty good decisions and those were the right decisions. Today, and the rest of my life, this is what I’m choosing.