New Year's Promises

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, I make New Year’s Promises.  For 2008, I promise to forgive and remember.  I promise to try to be kinder, not just to others but to myself as well, to be less critical of how I look, less focused on what I haven’t achieved.  I promise to discard the words “should have” from my vocabulary.  That goes for “might have been” and “what if.”  The past is gone, and no one knows where the future is.  But we do have Now – the wonderful, mercurial, exciting Constant Now.  I promise myself to seize it.  To take advantage of life.  Make my moments count.  I remind myself that this is a brand new year that has never been used.  And I think of the possibilities! 

Think of the possibilities in your own life.  Have you been wanting to write a novel?  Today is the best day to start it.  Make yourself a cup of tea, find a quiet, sunny spot and scribble down that germ of an idea, or that first paragraph (even the last paragraph!).  Don’t set out to write four hundred pages.  Whew!  No one can do that.  Just one page.  Like those cute 365-page-a-day calendars (mine has cats on it).  Promise yourself you will write just one page a day, and by the year’s end you will have your novel.

No reason to put it off!  A friend said to me the other day that the novel she has in mind to write will take her five years.  “I’ll be sixty by the time I finish!” she cried.  To which I said, “And how old will you be in five years if you don’t write the novel?”  Make a promise to yourself to start now.

And while we are making our New Year’s Promises, here’s one more promise to myself – to lose the pounds I gained over the holidays.  Just in time for Valentine’s Day chocolates.

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