New Years Eve is just like any other night; the world doesn’t stop and take a deep breath before plunging into a new year. All explosions of light and colour are man made, no meteors fly across the sky to show the worlds excitement at moving into another year. In fact some would say nothing changes once the clock strikes twelve. Worries remain, dreams are still just dreams, our lives go on.
Yet New Years Eve is a night like no other, it provides us with an opportunity to create an ending, to draw a line and create change. Ellen Goodman wrote, “We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential”.
To make an end is to create a beginning, and a new year is like a new much anticipated and as yet unopened book. Before you open it decide if it will be a book where the story has already been written, a familiar story that doesn’t really interest you but is easy to follow. Perhaps it is a story you have little control over and you’re not sure if it has a happy ending.
Or you could make it a book with empty pages on which you can write your own story page by page, changing and adapting the story as and when you need to. As with all good stories there will be periods of writers block, and others in your life may add a chapter or two, you may even need a co-writer at times. When you begin you will almost certainly not know how the book will end, but authors have a lot of influence and can finish the story any way they like, and as everyone knows, all good books if written well have a happy ending.
“Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page. Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past”. Henry Ward Beecher
Title quote by T.S.Elliot