And then it was Boxing Day

It happens every year. November and December revolve around the build up towards the 'festive season', the Christmas break, the time of the year where everything everywhere shuts down and people can slow down, spend time with the loved ones keeping up various family traditions and justify any excess with a smile on their faces.  We (at least I) tend to do more of the things that I want to do less of.

Facebook's walls are filled up with happy declarations of how fat people feel, or all the things that they think they should be doing but they won't do because it's Christmas.

Importantly this is also the time when people take respite to reflect on the year that has just gone and focus on the year ahead. This is a time of rebirth. I have wondered often (and I am sure I ain't the only one) whether the key point of having Jesus being born in this period, apart from the convenient overlapping with previous pagan festivities that Christmas replaced in the ancient Roman times,  is just recognising the fact that people need to think (and do think) about birth as the year comes to a close.  Just like the Big J we are reborn to save ourselves from our imperfections. We are given yet another opportunity to be the better selves that we want to be.

However, we give ourselves some few more days and wait until New Years Eve to really, really cement those determinations. It does sound like a good process, so why the great majority of us fails their New Year's resolutions? I thought about this over the years, investigating theories ranging from the depressing bad London weather to the conspiracy of self sabotage,  and I have formed the opinion that resolution and change should start and follow a different timeline pattern from the one we tend to adopt.

Just like I maintain that starting a diet on a Monday is a recipe for failure, I think that forming great determinations at the very end of the year is not necessarily a good idea. We charge that 1st of January with so much expectations, so much pressure, that when we find out that we are the same people on that day that we were the day before, the anticlimax is very likely to result in loss of drive. In addition, such an obvious starting point just stresses how long the road ahead is and suddenly we feel like we have started climbing Mount Kilimanjaro without the right gear to make it to the top.

Perhaps the solution is to look at the big picture, and see life as a long winding road that goes up and down. Whether the previous years has taken us up or down, that 1st of January really is not a new beginning, but the continuation of where we have been. It is not the day where we stop or start doing something, it is the day where we pick up where we left from at the last turn of the road. Christmas is hence not time to be born again, but just time to look ahead and plan for taking the right turn in our journey ahead. The end of the year is not the time for great determinations, it is the time to stop and set the SatNav towards our next destination. We might surprise ourselves and find that we have kicked off that length of the journey already.