This is the season for New Year’s resolutions. With the change of the year there are new opportunities for everything to be better. Maybe this time things will be different. We begin January with good intentions. But, it seems, we have been here before. The year changes, we don’t.
Just as December is the month of greatest retail sales, January is the month for gym and health club memberships. We set our goal to “do better,” to change a habit, or to lose weight, or to stop procrastinating, or to become organized, and 92 percent of the time we fail.
We fail not because we don’t have clarity on what we want to achieve, but because we don’t have clarity on the path to get there. We don’t have increments on the way to our goal to celebrate the journey. We have only an end vision of how things will be better, not a real plan for getting there. We have only the “old way,” or “old self” that we are fleeing.
The problem is that no matter where I go, I am still there.
Times of transition in life can be hard to navigate because, while we might be able envision the desired end state, we don’t love the process of getting there. It is in the process of transition that change happens; that things become different or I begin to see things differently.
Wandering in the desert can be its own reward, if we “let go and let God.” Perhaps this means letting go of the old self to prepare for the new one day at a time.
Grace and Peace.
