What Are Your Goals For 2015?

The New Year is a natural time for reflection and renewal. The act of taking down last year’s calendar is the storing away of last year’s memories, stashed away along with the other years of our life. Some memories we may visit often, others will fade away, like ink on paper, faint, hard to make out, eroded from time. On the other hand, a new calendar adorns your wall. Fresh, with nary a mark on it. Like starting a fresh notebook, anything can happen. Nothing has been defined and you bring to it only what you take with you.

Because of this, reinventing the self is a highly desired goal for many people. It’s common to think of the New Year as a chance to reflect and reinvent ourselves. A quick browse of your Facebook’s news feed will reveal articles upon articles featuring the “Best of 2015…” and “15 Resolutions for 2015.” But, I tend to think of reinvention as a subtle process. We don’t change immediately once the clock strikes 12 on January 1.

Have you kept your resolutions so far?

Maybe. But it’s pretty unlikely you’ll keep them for the whole year. That’s because drastic change is hard. Most of the time, change is gradual, sometimes almost imperceptible.

You might not notice the change on a daily basis, but the differences build up with time. Just remember how it was growing up, when you didn’t truly notice how much you’ve grown until you compared your height to the pencil markings on the wall from a year ago.

I’ve spent most of my adult life away from my hometown of NYC. After every semester in college (I went to school in Atlanta), after studying abroad in England for a summer, and after a semester abroad in Scotland, and even now that I’m based in Dublin, Ireland, I always find myself back home in NYC for the holidays. In a way, things never really change at home. It’s a constant, a pocket in space-time where kids will always be their parent’s baby, no matter how old we get. While home doesn’t change much, every time I go back, I realize how much I’ve changed and usually it’s the little things that trigger this awareness. After my first semester in college, I found myself itching to do my own laundry; however, my mom insisted on doing it (and still does, if I’m at home, to this day).

Maybe we’re going about New Year’s resolutions the wrong way. Perhaps we should take a different approach this year. Change doesn’t have to be drastic! Change happens whether you like it or not. You just have to, sort of, nudge it in the direction you desire. So scrap your resolutions, or, better yet, call them goals instead. And resolve to work towards those goals, little by little.

What are your goals for the year? (Cough… Intern in Ireland… cough!) 😀