Starting a New Year with Lifes Simple Pleasures
The new year is just over a week old and we have all reconvened in our regular lives – returned back to work, school and our everyday activities. The decorations are put away…the holiday cookies eaten…family has gone home from visiting and we have settled back into normal routines, possibly modified because of goals or resolutions set. It’s a New Year. We are hopeful.
For New Year’s, many set the stage for the year ahead with hopes, dreams, and faith. Resolutions are set, goals are laid out. We are well meaning in our quest for changes in our lives. Losing weight, smoking cessation, eating healthier, exercising more, working harder, reaching for that promotion….our goals/resolutions tend to focus on self improvement and personal growth. As well they should! We are, in the end, responsible for our own health, happiness, and advancement.
But the truth is, we really can’t do it all alone.
On New Year’s Eve, just a few minutes before the ball drops, one can look around to see what the anticipation of 2017 and the beginning of a New Year looks like. The vision is not at all what one might think. Instead of watching a group of young revelers imbibing and causing security/police to be extra cautious, there is a true cross section of people at different ages and stages of their lives. Young partners in their 20s and 30s, mothers and fathers who brought their young children for the experience, grandparents who came on their own or with their families. The sea of people who wait with expectancy for the ball to drop and for the New Year to begin is not at all one dimensional. Friends together….families holding each other with anticipation…people in their 40s and 50s looking towards the New Year…older folks in their 70s and 80s who clutch onto each other with love and expectancy, looking towards the change into the New Year with hope and faith and–love. These are the constants that everyone shares: faith, hope and love. You can see it on their faces. There is a potpourri of races, ages, socioeconomic classes, gender identities and sexual orientations. Nobody cares how old the other person was, where they came from or who they were kissing at midnight. Nobody even cared about the weight they said they were going to lose in the New Year! Everyone only had three things on their mind: faith, hope and love. It is a magical and eye-opening moment, trumped only by that moment after the ball drops when everyone in the sea of people engages in an embrace and kiss. The hope and faith is palpable. The love is overflowing. You can feel it. You can taste it. It truly is magical.
At that moment of the ball dropping and the New Year dawning, nobody cares about politics or taxes or sexual preference…at that very moment, the only important thing on everyone’s mind is love. The people with whom that love is shared, the people who we each hold so close and dear…those are the people who are in our arms, on our minds and in our hearts at the stroke of midnight. That is the only thing that really matters. Life’s most simple pleasure. Love.
As the year progresses, and we once again become more enmeshed in our everyday responsibilities and routines, it is easy to forget that moment of magic. Life happens. There are ebbs and flows, triumphs and sorrows. The world keeps turning but the one constant that holds us together – no matter what – is the love that we share with those that are closest to us. Love. Relationships. Human Connections. We can survive almost anything as long as we have that.
Don’t let anything interrupt the love, relationships and connections that you held so dear on New Year’s Eve. Keep that with you all through the year and if anything – stress, communication loss, hearing loss, time, or people – forms a wall between you and your relationships, then climb over that wall to hold them close.
We need this glue to get through everything else: Love. Relationships. Human Connections. Communication.
