Okay, be honest! How do you like the “New Years Resolutions” phrase? Do you shun the idea because your resolutions haven’t stuck in the past? Do you welcome the symbol of another chance to begin again and really make the changes you’ve been hoping for?
Many people feel stuck in their circumstances but haven’t succeeded in changing them. They may have tried diligently in the past and gotten exhausted with the effort, only to slide back to the status quo. I get that. We ALL get that. We’ve all been there more times than we would like to admit. How will this day and this year be any different?
If we make resolutions, we are telling ourselves that we’ve DECIDED. We will do this or we will stop doing that. If we don’t keep the resolution, did we fail (once again)? It turns out that failure is necessary in order to succeed! No one has been successful without first having experienced failure, sometimes many times over. I imagine that you’ve heard the story of Thomas Edison, who eventually invented the incandescent light bulb. He admits to 10,000 “failures” on the journey; however, he says that he merely found 10,000 ways it wouldn’t work. Other inventors were also experimenting with the same goal in mind, but Edison was the one to succeed.
Edison had a habit every day of sitting down in his rocking chair and going to “the land of solutions”, as he called it. He would rock back and forth holding a rock in his left hand. He always had a metal pail positioned just under the rock, so that if he were to fall asleep, the noise would wake him up. What he was doing was accessing a higher intelligence, one that has all the answers. He knew that there can’t be a problem without a solution and there can’t be a question without an answer. The fact that his mind could even conceive of the incandescent light bulb was proof that there was a way to make it happen. He just needed to be persistent.
Whether or not you have succeeded in the resolutions you have made in the past, each day offers a new opportunity. If we are still resolved to create change, we just need to renew that resolve and go at it again. We change the story we have been telling ourselves and open up to options that may help us move along. Tell the Universe that you are open to help and that you definitely intend to create this change. Making this declaration to the Universe and to ourselves strengthens our resolve and reminds us to be open to the possibilities out there.
Allow this day and this new year to signify the start of a new cycle, in which we don’t carry the burden of what may have happened in the past. Perhaps, as with Edison, we are just learning the ways in which we can’t accomplish the change we want. We are learning what doesn’t work.