Long before I spent New Year's Eve with my friends out at parties, I would spend my New Year's Eve with my parents at a family function. Although admittedly less dazzling, I have always loved the idea of New Year's. The feeling of a natural new beginning, a fresh start. As I got older, I realized I was not alone. The Internet has no shortage of the “new year, new you” mantra and articles that advise on how to make the upcoming year the best yet. So what is our obsession with a new start? What is it about reinvention that has us reading articles about New Year diets and resolutions that will make the new year one to remember?
The future, though ominous and uncertain, is filled with possibility. It is easy to imagine a perfect year where we start going to the gym or saving more money or any of the number of things we tell ourselves that we will do, come midnight. Our New Year's resolutions are a way to take mental note of our dissatisfaction with our life and hope for a triumph over our past experiences. They give us solace in pretending that we can erase the mistakes of our past and start anew no longer defined by them. But we can’t ever really get rid of our past, can we? Our mistakes, our shortcomings, the little things we don’t like about ourselves, they exist at 11:59 and they will still be there to greet us at 12:00.
We are obsessed with New Year’s Eve because we believe it will magically wipe away all the things we regret from the past year. The glitter and champagne-filled changing of the clock gives us the feeling in that minute that we can get a do-over. We believe that with enough good friends around us and enough alcohol, that we really can get a fresh start in the upcoming year. But the changing doesn’t come with the tick of the clock, and the “clean slate” doesn’t come when the ball drops.
The change we so desperately want comes simply from deciding that we want to change.
Though the ball dropping and the New Year’s kisses don’t magically hit a reset button on our lives, they do give us a whole new year, a new calendar, new hopeful plans, and the desire to be better.
There is no true concept of starting over—all that you are, you carry with you always. But the passing of time does allow you to grow. All the bad decisions and mistakes are still there from the previous year. But where they once limited you and controlled you, they become experience. Who we are, the choices we make, the opportunities we don’t take…undoubtedly define us. But how they define us is up to us.
It is never too late to start over. It’s never too late to change, to grow, or to become the person you always wanted to be. But no clock, no new planner, no online article, can give you that new start. Our best shot at a magical clean slate, is in our decision to be that person we always wanted to be. Whether it be the dazzling New Year’s Eve that is the turning point or in the dead middle of March, a “new you” can come the second you make the decision you no longer want to be that person defined by their faults anymore.
