Unlike Christmas, which I am rather ambivalent towards, I like New Year because it feels like a new beginning for me. Sure, it's arbitrary and man-made but an artificial chance is still a chance.
From the age of 12 I've been making resolutions (some absurd and most not kept) but this year I got to thinking about the resolutions early. At lunch with Edie, Sindhu and Shirin the other day, Sindhu put forward the idea that if you cannot genuinely be happy for people, the Universe takes things away from you and I was greatly struck by it.
I felt like the principle extended to a kind of general niceness - if I couldn't genuinely try my best to be kind, then maybe there would be some kind of seriously negative energy generated.
The more I thought about it in conjunction with my resolutions, the more I realised that all the mean, unkind, inappropriate things that I do, say or think have to do with temptation. Anger and irritation tempt me to mean thoughts or unnecessarily sarcastic words. Delight in gossip tempts me to see the worst in people.
And while I don't really think people should eschew wicked humour and view each other with a sugary piousness, I do feel that I could try harder to understand where people are coming from or to walk a mile in their shoes rather than judging them in my head right off the bat.
I happened to run out of pages in my old journal several days before 2014 and so, with the theme of fresh starts in mind, I put this C.S. Lewis quote on the first page of my new one.
In the New Year, I plan to practice holding off the temptation to be nasty... for an hour each time, at least.
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Say your peace, yo.