Happy New Year

Haven’t been around lately, too much kid-in-lacrosse, holidays, and writing for people other than me. I’ll be surprised if this gets one read since I’ve been gone so long, so I’ll keep this one short.

Every new year brings a flurry of “new year, new me” activity. Posts, texts, hopeful convos with friends about how we’re gonna go big or go home this year. We’re gonna hustle harder. Finally get in shape. Accomplish more. Be more.

Let’s take a pause before we dive into becoming entirely whole new people. Let’s reflect on the reasoning behind us doing this every year, a lot of us failing to meet our marks and go right back to sitting on our asses or picking right back up our habits we want to break.

Why haven’t our resolutions been maintainable?

Many times it’s because we’re taking it all on at once and boy, we want to change a whole bunch about ourselves. We want the changes all at once to, you know, ring in the fresh new year with fresh new us-selves. We’re focusing on what we want to look like or what we want our bodies to do instead of focusing on how to get our brains to cooperate with our plans.

We can maintain zero unless we organically allow a new habit to implant into our subconscious. Our default system, the one that can make decisions without our pesky consciousness’ opinions to get in the way. The subconscious needs to think our plans are a great idea so it needs time and repetition in order to understand. We’ll go insane attempting to take on all of our great new habits at once because our subconscious doesn’t operate in this way. It runs on repetition, buried trauma, and what it knows we usually do.

Habits are formed by speaking our subconscious minds’ language and our subconscious needs to cooperate in order for any new thing you want to implement to stick.

Take one resolution at a time. Give our subconsciousness’ some breathing room to cooperate with our plans. Everybody’s different but for a lot of us it takes around a month or so.

When we see we can do something automatically, without consciously armoring up to accomplish it, we’re there and we can start focusing on a new habit to imprint into our lives. One thing at a time. Slowly. With meaning. Sit quietly with ourselves to figure out the means to do our things and not just the results we want.

Our brains won’t have it any other way.

If you’re not into New Year’s resolutions, here’s a few things that should be on all of our lists:

Be kinder.

Have more understanding that everyone projects their own subconscious trauma all over everybody else, usually manifesting in fear or anger, and take a pause before unleashing ours. Maybe we don’t need to every time.

Absorb fully the absolute fact that no one or no thing can make us happy. It’s our own responsibility to make our own selves happy.

Happy New Year, friends. Let this be the year of “new year, new US”. Let’s collectively decide to go slower. Have more empathy. Compliment and enjoy each other more. Love every day and not just vacation days. Reflect on our responses to the other humans before unleashing words and emotions.

2023. New Year. New way of thinking. New way of being. The world will never reflect what we want. The world will always and forever only reflect what we ARE.

Let’s do 2023 at our kindest and best.