A little over a year ago I asked myself the question, can you really change yourself if you aren’t happy? I thought it was possible and I had nothing to lose so I committed to change and embarked on a one year journey towards becoming who I wanted to be. A few weeks ago when I hit my deadline, I asked myself, have I changed? Did my 365 day experiment really accomplish what I hoped it would? As I pondered that question, I thought I am happy therefore my process must have worked; however, I didn’t realize just how successful it really was until recently.
Let’s rewind a few days back to New Year’s Eve. It was the last day of 2011 and I was ready for what I hoped would be a wonderful ending to a pretty great year for me. It was an unseasonably warm Saturday for December in the Northeast, a long weekend off from work, and I was headed to a great party to ring in 2012 with some of my favorite people in the world. Basically, life was good.
When my friends started to arrive at my house to get ready for the party, I began to see that some of them were as eager to celebrate the beginning of this new year as I was. As we discussed the past 365 days and the upcoming year, I noticed that we wanted the start of 2012 for completely different reasons.
Ultimately, a new year is the perfect time to start over. It's a time to reevaluate your life and the direction it is heading in. Last year, I saw my current status as not exactly where I wanted to be in the bigger picture or where I thought I would be at that time of my life but I decided I had to stop looking at things that way. A year later, I can safely say that I am really happy where I’m at. Great things are happening for me now and I’ve chosen to look for them rather than dwell on the what might have beens or how things aren’t. As 2011 ticked its final few seconds away, I watched people say good riddance to a year they would rather forget as I said goodbye to one that I hope I will always remember.
For the first time in a long time, New Year’s Eve wasn’t about wiping the slate clean but rather it was about keeping momentum. It was about taking what was an incredible year for me and pushing forward to make the next one just as amazing if not better. Instead of seeing a new door or another chance to get things right, I saw opportunity and possibility to continue building the life I had already started working on. I have never been this optimistic about life so I guess that is the best proof that my little social project was a complete and total success. And the craziest part about all this is that nothing about me or my life dramatically changed in 2011 but I changed my mindset and that completely changed everything else in the process.
"You create your own universe as you go along." - Winston Churchill
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