Fresh starts happen every year  thanks to the calendar, just flip forwards to January & it’s a new year, our reward for surviving another 12 months, and with January comes the great tradition of new year’s resolutions, a chance to put our pasts behind us and start over. It’s hard to resist the opportunity of a new beginning, a chance to put the problems of last year to bed once and for all. However, after years of failed resolutions i have come to realise that January is just another month and January 1^st is just another day.

Too often resolutions are based on what people think they should be doing as oppose to what they actually want to be doing.  It’s like the first of January comes and everyone starts picking themselves to pieces to find all these flaws so that they can fix them in the new year, which merely highlights the huge gap between who we are and who we want to be.

I know i’m flawed. I don’t need Janaury to remind me. I don’t think it’s the calendar, or a birthday, or a new year that spurs us change. It’s an event, big or small, something that actually changes us, something that gives us hope, or a new way of living and looking at the world. Something that moves us and allows us to let go of those old habits and bad memories, you can’t pretend that the last year hasn’t happened; the world of pretend is a cage not a cocoon. We are who we are. The point is you don’t need a new year to make a resolution you can do that any day of any month, new beginnings can happen whenever you want. I’ll let you know when mine starts. 

Reblogged from 2011 with a few changes. Sometimes my wisdom really surprises me!

…Graduating, after two years of fun, one year working and one year where i constantly wished i had worked harder in the first two years instead of having fun I finally graduated. In retrospect there are a few thing I’d change namely my time management. But as they say, ” All’s well that ends well” and it ended with a 2:1 in Politics and International Relations (with French) so I really cannot complain. 

… Finally deciding what i want to do in life. This year after graduation the penny dropped. I was officially an adult, a graduate, so in addition to the fact that I was already old enough to vote, drink, and engage in other adult activities. Suddenly, people expected me know what i wanted to do in life, I was expected to be responsible, serious… a grown up!! After a few weeks of avoiding this new responsibility including a week in Turkey and 5 or 6 catching up on Movies /TV programmes. I got a job (mainly to silence my parents) luckily I was able to avoid retail (working through the NEXT Christmas sale in 2008 has permanently scarred me) and after a few temporary stints here and there I ended up working as an Events and Training coordinator for the London School of Economics. Ok job, good money, what more could a recent graduate want? Well lots apparently. Whist the money was great for my wardrobe the job had the opposite effect on my happiness. So I decided to take a pretty big pay cut and join a small company in Leyton and i think it might be one of my best decisions to date. I really enjoy my job and i hear that’s pretty rare, its exactly what I want to be doing in life right now (Marketing/PR) and for now that’s enough. 

“Choose a job you love, & you will never have to work a day in your life”

-Confucius