Are you thinking of making New Year's resolutions for 2010 – again? Ones which, let’s face it, we will almost certainly break, by – oh, around the end of the first week, if not sooner!
This year let's do something different.
Why not make some New YOU resolutions? Call them ‘New You Revolutions’ if you like. Better still call it an attitude realignment. You can’t break one of those!
Attitudes come out of deeply-held beliefs. Many of them are too complex to express, but here are a few that many of us share:
Belief #1. What can I do, I'm only one person . . ?
Lucky that Churchill, Florence Nightingale, Fred Hollows and Gandhi didn't say that. Where would millions have been if Mother Theresa had sat back in her home village, in what was then Yugoslavia, and said "Well, it's quite obvious that I can do nothing. I am only a woman."? And would we be as comfortable today in Australia if individual young men and women had not battled sixty-plus years ago in mud and jungle to win us safety? Bryce Courtenay in his brilliant novel The Power of One has six year old Peekay say, "Small can beat big if you have a plan." One can beat a multitude too.
Belief #2. I'm getting older. Life is passing me by.
Over four hundred years ago Cervantes said: "As a man thinks, so does he become. Every man is the son of his own works." Think old - you'll be and act old. Think useful, and you will be. Mid-life often brings us more than wrinkles. It can affect our teeth, our eyesight and bring on many aches and pains that we never knew we had – or it can build on the wisdom and experience of the life we’ve already lived, enabling us at last to really contribute to our world. The choice is ours. Reactive people use 'I can't. He made me do it. That gets me angry. That's just the way I am!' Proactive behaviour makes no excuses – just gets in and does something about the problem.
Come to the edge, he said.
They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge, he said.
They came.
He pushed them, and they flew.....
Guillaume Apollinaire (19th-century French poet)
Belief #3. I'm not much good.
Cellulite? So what! 'Laugh-lines'? Who's laughing? Certainly not the person who's finding them. But try to forget those external things. Carl Jung a prominent twentieth century psychiatrist and psychologist once said:
"Who looks outside dreams; who looks insides wakes." Sometimes looking at the outside is more like a nightmare – but I need to value myself for what I am inside.
Belief #4. The world is full of greedy, angry, selfish people, out for themselves alone.
True? Yes – and no. It is also full of sad, hurting, nervous, gentle, loving, needy people too. It all depends on how we look at them. If I lend you my glasses, you might see the world quite differently, because my lenses are ground to suit the special needs of my own eyes. Your glasses would not suit me. Does that make what we see any different? Of course not – but it sure alters the way we react sometimes.
Belief #5. As the saying goes, 'Life's a bitch, and then you die’.
Goethe, that great German poet, did not believe that. "This life is the childhood of our eternity," he said. Being a child can be difficult – learning, changing, being disciplined unfairly sometimes – but it makes us the sort of grown-ups we will become. The great thinker, Hazrat Inayat Khan, said: "Life is what it is, you cannot change it, but you can change yourself."
A New You? What better way to start a New Year.
MAKE IT HAPPEN: A CHANGE A DAY
Find some paper and note down some changes you want to make. If they are large changes (lose weight, get a job) break them up into smaller changes and then tiny steps. Find the prettiest, brightest, happiest calendar you can – one with big boxes for each day and write one small change into each square. Tick each one, boldly – triumphantly – at the end of the day.
