Happy New Year! I hope you all had a beautiful start to 2015. I find that most New Year's Eves are usually anti-climactic, but I think it's because my expectations were never set to anything grounded in reality. It's usually like "this New Year's Eve I'll go to the party of my life with a bunch of close friends and I'll have a giant epiphany that will make everything click and make sense in my life!" Never mind that I never reserved a spot or ticket for said party, or talked to said friends. Mainly it's just a plan in my mind that I expect to unfold regardless of me actually doing anything. This year, however, I actually set realistic expectations...and once I expected my New Year's Eve to be low-key, I was satisfied. I even fell asleep 5 minutes after midnight. Sleep in the new year!
Anyways, let's talk resolutions. I've never been one for really laying out concrete resolutions...more like guidelines for how I want to shape my life each day. This year, my resolution is resolution. Daily resolution. I love the musical definition of this word the most, which is the move of a note from dissonance to consonance. In other words, the shift of things or elements from unstable and disharmonius to stable and in harmony. Isn't that a lovely thought? When it happens in music, you can feel it. Like a sigh of relief.
I know that dissonance creeps in, but I want to make sure that I'm not dwelling in that or focusing on that more than I need to. I drift into that mindset and often get stuck there, so my resolution is to strive for internal harmony amidst the external dissonance that happens in life.
I recently came across an Annie Dillard quote that I want to think on each morning: "I wake expectant, hoping to see a new thing." I really like that. I also like this picture that I found when looking up definitions:
What caught my eye most was "a simple, sincere and serene life." A great thought to start the new year with.