Welcome to 2024
Every year I can remember since I was a kid, celebrating the new year always meant New Year’s Resolutions. Taking stock of the previous year, everything I wanted to do but didn’t, what I did wrong, what I wanted to change, plans, goals, dreams, etc. Like most people, my grand schemes for losing weight, getting fitter, making more money, and the like, got swallowed up in day to day life.
Sometime in my thirties, I decided that I wasn’t going to make these promises to myself anymore, thereby eliminating the feeling of failure that always went along with breaking those promises. In a way, it necessitated looking at January 1st as ‘just another day’. I did the same thing I did the day before, and I’ll do the same thing tomorrow. And that is okay, because I love what I did!
I think it’s great to want to make changes but picking a day to launch them just seems silly and puts on too much pressure.
I took the picture above a few weeks ago off my back porch at dawn. It had been pouring rain for weeks and I get very down about the weather sometimes, so it was a really nice change. Our family suffered some losses recently. A couple days after Thanksgiving, my sister-in-law passed away and eleven days before Christmas my sister’s partner also passed very suddenly and unexpectedly. My heart is crushed for my husband’s family and my own. It is sort of responsible for my deciding to take up the New Year’s resolution idea again, but in a different way.
Obviously, death is a natural part of life and nothing to be feared, but living without knowing how much you are loved is something else. I want to make sure the people I love know how much I love them!
It’s very easy to get caught up in day to day life, so making sure I don’t slip into my own world and forget to look out, is my resolution for 2024. Is there anything that greatly affected your life last year, good or bad? Don’t forget to pay attention to the little things that may not seem too important. You don’t realize how much you may miss them when they are gone. I hope you all have a very happy and memorable new year!
4 responses to “Welcome to 2024”
My heart is touched by your words, and I suspect many people will relate to the “new year’s resolutions issue” but, my brother provided me with the perfect advice…”don’t look back, you’re not going that way.” We can regret, but not be captive to it. Best to consider it as “lesson learned.” And, I agree, we need to express our love more often!
Your picture is stunning! I thought, at first, it was a sunset after a storm. Being in the right place at the right time brings its rewards.
The system we use to track time is odd because there really is no “end of the year” as everything is just a cycle. Nature has cycles, no beginning and no end, and we are the same. Death is part of a cycle, maybe not the end the way we have been made to see it.
Materialism has been pushed into our ways of being, we have almost completely forgotten spirituality or we usually have a warped sense of it.
Your newsletter was really right on point. I agree with you, It’s time to focus on what’s important. Loving and being loved along with letting spiritualism enter our lives is probably a very good way to exist these days.
Thank you for sharing the beautiful picture and the beautiful story with us. I really appreciate you. You are important and a beautiful soul.
Thank you 🙏
good!!!