New year - How can I make "it" better?
What is this anyway? "It" as the year? Just a time frame.. Or is "it" me and my life?.. Hmm, better.
It is the 31st of December again. It is a Saturday too.
We, my wife and I, have a nice little weekend ritual of going to bed, where we have a little break, sleep, or whatever… after which we usually have a traditional Swedish (as if we were Swedes…NOT.. hehe) “Fika”, something sweet and coffee.
In contrast to most Saturdays, we skipped our afternoon nap today.
For various reasons.
Even though we are on a loose, meaning, we are steadily losing our indoctrination as enslaved humans, we are still affected by the so-called Gregorian Calendar, which everybody else around us uses. So we stick to that. And this calendar says tomorrow is a whole new year.
New year resolutions are so chliché and the banality of these resolutions are in synch with their success rate. But things are what you do with them, right?
Sometimes it’s a good thing to put an end to a period and start off fresh.
So we sat around the kitchen table, the conference table and I posed a question:
How can we make the next time period, may it be the next Gregorian year, for what it's worth, or any other “next time period” - better?
And I actually took a small whiteboard, 25cm x 35cm is what we have (So I better write tidy and small..), even if a 4x4 meters hardly would be enough.
The above question is posed to anyone and everyone.
And it may sound so familiar that it is almost a cliché, a banal thing that just about everybody does. But it has a twist to it actually.
Most people keep themselves enslaved to their daily duties, or worse - their Teddy Bear (Read: mobile phone), busy with the world around them, the materialistic realm and/or people around them, without the obvious “Oddacity” to look inwards, within oneself.
This is where I beg to differ.
“How do I make the next time better” does not mean:
I wish Steve will mary Eve.
And Jim finally hits the gym…
Or…
Another aversion in a different version.
All but myself…
… Are the wishes on my shelf.
It starts with you, and it is in general something you, yourself, on your own, have to do with yourself, in your own realm, in your mind, in your life.
With courage, a big portion of persistence - since old habits die hard, and lots of humility.
Have I mentioned humbleness already? Because the ego is mostly the biggest hurdle.
No one else, since you cannot - by the Universal law of Free Will - affect other people in their own life. Not more than they allow it themselves anyway.
Be patient, be persistent. be goal oriented.
Not very often has a lasting change ever made within minutes or seconds, unless it involves a trauma, and although not impossible, lasting changes - big as small, and everything in between, need time to set in, as they must become a habit.
I once read a book named “The Power of Habit” which I highly recommend on this topic.
Habits are patterns of behavior that become sustainable due to getting ingrained and settled in our psyche, by routing and rerouting of our wiring. Our brain gets rewired, and it takes a minimum of several weeks (I heard the number 21 days - 3 weeks, but it might be less than helpful to hang on to a number).
And by the way, the plasticity of our psyche and our ability to form new habits and change is nothing less than remarkable, and it makes the brain young too! Being on the path of change, new nerve channels are being created which are healthy, rather than the old junk that needs to go cell death (apoptosis in the medical Gibberish) anyway.
An actual, live example from our board:
(Knowing that conflicts go south usually by the means of impatience and using bad words)
X becomes more patient by letting stuff go without exploding, understanding of the needs of others to improve themselves, as long as they do their best of course)
It is written in the present form and focuses primarily on oneself.
If there is a bad pattern, it has to be exchanged with another default, a better go-to behavior, so that it is easier to leave the old behavior pattern and behave differently.
Try to make the changes in yourself regardless whether they depend on someone else or the surrounding.
Fighting things that are clearly not in your control are, needless to say, futile at best, stressful and right out destructive at worse. Quit this shit. Don’t like the weather? Get depressed? Then go and get a hug, take some vitamin D drops, as opposed to making everybody else irritated/angry/depressed, i.e. dragging all others around to lower vibrations.
Even though we have done it only this one time, i know we are on the right track, as we are committed to become a better family and the picture in our horizon, which I have envisioned to my beloved ones is: I want to make sure that we become the loving, supportive and constructive nest for our children, and when they are older, they still come to visit regularly, with their families and we not just tolerate one another but look forward to meet and socialize as best friends, long years after being in our parental custody.
I hope this is helpful, and if it resonates, tell me.
If not - tell me about it too.
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