With Christmas firmly out the way for next few months, Cadbury’s Creme Eggs already being stocked at the local garage (I kid you not!!) and still a few days off work for some of us, we can officially put the tinsel away. As we lurch into the week between Christmas and New Year we are all shopped out, sick of eating and nursing the mother of all hangovers from 3 days drinking. It is about this time that our thoughts turn to the New Year. The plans, the dress, who we will be kissing when Big Ben hits twelve and of course the resolutions. After weeks of excess our belly’s bulge over our AllSaints jeans, our favourite Office killer heels are looking a little worse for wear and no amount of YSL Touché Éclat will cover the bin liner type bags that are under our eyes. Suddenly a healthy life style complete with gym membership, vegetable smoothies and a yoga toned body seems like the Holy Grail. As we make promises to ourselves and each other that this will be the year we give up drinking, the year we stop smoking, the year we drop a dress size and tone up and the year we break all our bad habits. With our resolves strengthened by the New Years day hang over and the left over vodka haze blurring our take on reality, we throw ourselves and our credit cards into the promise we have made. However the reality of the crazily high and sometimes unrealistic expectations we have willingly committed to can often result in failing. In fact according to statistics, 88% of all New Year resolutions end up failing. A scary and negative fact to start the New Year on! So with this in mind maybe it was time re-evaluate the resolutions we normally make and look at other options.
In some ways New Year is a bit like a date. A really hot date. But instead of with some fit man you have longingly fluttered your Dior Show mascaraed eyes at, it’s more of a date with destiny. Like any date so much energy and effort goes in to getting ready, choosing the perfect outfit and arranging venues. The familiar tingles of anticipation rises up your spine as you approach the magic hour. It all looks and feels amazing through the wine and mojitos, everything sparkles and just for once you think, this might be it! This could be the one that works out, the one that really changes everything!!
It is with all this energy and excitement that our expectations raise to scary high heights and we are totally unprepared for the wake up fall when the cold hard light of day arrives. Prince charming wasn’t what we thought he would be, the diet crumbles when the hang over kicks in and there is never a practical time to organize your kitchen draw so why try, you know where everything is!
So as another year rolls to an end and the window of opportunity that is a new year opens it arms to us what do we do? Sit and let it go silently by? Quickly grab it and make it promise us the world? Or do we simply slip on our favourite heels, put on another coat of lipstick and promise ourselves that this year we will give this year our best shot. We will say yes more to opportunities, we will hold the people we love just a little bit tighter and we will be kinder to ourselves. As the year goes by it is easy to look back think of how old we are getting, how many goals we have set that we are yet to achieve and how many things we have done that, given the chance we would do so differently. It is easy to forget that the benefit of aging is experience and confidence, the advantage to setting goals is that they are moveable features, things we can happily spend a life time working towards and the mistakes we make are simply lessons learnt. The journey may be long, the detours may be unplanned and sometimes painful but they make us realise what’s important, what the goal really is and sometimes gives us the opportunity to question if we really want it that much.
I hope 2012 see’s us skinner, eating healthier and smashing all our bad habits, if that’s what we want. But most of all I hope it brings us all kindness, acceptance and most of all love.
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