Happy New Year’s Eve!
The last day of 2021. A perfect time to reflect on the year just ending, and to make the necessary adjustments and plans to start the new year in the right way for you.
In today’s Friday Forum, I am sharing some particularly good insights for the new year transition.
First, some valuable tips from Mark and Angel Chernoff (marcandangel.com). I find these two, and this site, to be among the very best in self-improvement .
- If we’ve learned one thing this year, it’s that we need to be gentle with ourselves and others. We’re all a bit weary and stressed. Be recklessly gracious.
- We cannot control exactly what happens in life, but we can control how we respond to it all. In your response is your greatest power.
- No single struggle defines everything we are. No single chapter tells the whole story. Keep turning the pages that need to be turned.
- If the grass looks greener on the other side, stop staring, stop comparing, and start watering the grass you’re standing on.
- When life feels like an emotional roller coaster, steady yourself with simple rituals. Make the bed. Water the plants. Rinse off your own bowl and spoon. Simplicity attracts calmness and wisdom.
The bottom line is, despite the real world challenges you face, the biggest and most complex obstacle you will ever have to personally overcome is your own mind. In other words, you aren’t responsible for everything that happens, but you ARE responsible for undoing the self-defeating thinking and behavioral patterns that these undesirable experiences create.
Second, so much has been said about how fast time goes by. This perception has accelerated in our current frantic world of social media and shortened attention spans.
In the excellent article on Thomas Oppong in Medium, he reviews the timeless wisdom of Seneca about slowing down time. Seneca was a Roman Philosopher who lived 2020 years ago, and his wisdom is still highly relevant today.
Happy reading, and I wish everyone a very Happy New Year!
Jay