Thoughts about new beginnings

Another year done and dusted… New feelings of starting afresh… like every year. It’s funny how we measure our achievements by looking at them as happening in big finite chunks of time. A year… twelve months… 365 days of things happening to you good or bad, and the new year approaches as a huge blank book, a big white canvass, it’s all very exciting, all these new possibilities: I’ll go to the gym, I’ll change my hairstyle, I’ll find a better job, I’ll find the man of my life, I’ll travel to new places, I’ll meet new people, I’ll stop smoking and drinking… All looking great… Yes! Let’s chuck in the bin this awful last year! Let’s forget all about it and look into the new one! Time slows down, comes to a stop momentarily, and here we go again!

It’s as if everything should have a proper beginning. To open a new chapter we need to have closed the previous one properly, a kind of ceremony which often involves having lots of what we’re planning not to have anymore, like food, cigarettes or alcoholic drinks. If you go on a diet or start going to the gym, more often than not you will choose a Monday or the first day of the month for that, a proper start. If you choose any other day, it won’t feel like it’s happening, somehow…

We like celebrating beginnings and ends. Beginning or end of a year, start of the weekend, end of academic year, start of summer holidays… Yes, chunks of time… and if we don’t have these chunks of time as points of reference we are lost and it just makes no sense… Although on the first day of the year our brain is usually too muddled to handle all these new fantastic projects, so we make an exception and start everything on the second. It makes sense… Happy hangover!

If this doesn’t make any sense to you, it’s fine, I wrote it with a hangover…