Tuesday, December 30, 2014

What’s New?

With the New Year come resolutions that are often not kept. With the New Year come fresh beginnings for taxes, college courses and some branches of government. The New Year is an arbitrary time in many ways. Some businesses work on a different financial calendar than one beginning January 1. In many situations, we agree on what we will call the New Year, and then we follow the protocols that come with it. This is when we start over, wipe the slate clean, draw a new line for recording information and calculating it. The cynics in our midst might agree with Qoheleth in the scriptures, “There is nothing new under the sun.” We just pretend
that it is.

How do we genuinely make a new start, a fresh beginning, different life? We have certain activities that are built into our way of life that we can’t just stop or reverse all at once. We have to get the resources we need for food, clothing, and shelter, if we are to survive physically. We have to relate to our family and friends with respect, interest, concern and contact, if we want to keep them in our lives. We have to meet certain obligations like taxes, traffic laws and social proprieties, or else we face negative  consequences. How do we not feel boxed into life with little room for change or something new and different?

The New Year is not about a date on the calendar, and making a fresh start isn’t about abandoning all that we did in the past. Attitude and style can transform the same old, same old into something different and exciting. We get into a rut when we just focus on getting things done. Because the activities are routine ones which come around every day, week, month or year, they can drag us down with their drudgery. But this doesn’t have to be. We can change the way we do things, with whom we do them and the organization we use to get them done. We can break up the job into pieces and share the activity with helpers. We can bring new people into the routine and mix pleasure with work by connecting social time to follow work time. We can celebrate a job completed well before we move on to the next one. We need to know when to stop working because we are tired and frustrated, and come back to the task later when we are refreshed. We need to foster cooperation in getting a job done rather than competition, not trying to outdo each other but rather do for others through our work.

Baxter is a slavish creature of habit. He does the same things at about the same time every day. I don’t think he knows it’s a New Year, or even a new day. He just plods along doing his cat business with contentment. We look for more from life, but we have to put more into living if we are going to find it. We have to make it a New Year by bringing newness into our lives in different ways. Think about how you can do this for yourself. It’s God’s way of making your burdens light and lifting your spirit to be one with His.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!