How to do New Year Resolutions, Every Day is a Clean Start

How is the NewYear for you?

Remember, you don't have to wait until 2016 to start something new!

Every new dawn is your gift, your blank slate, your chalk in your hand.

Consider this analogy: in the pioneer days, a child first learning to use chalk and a slate. They dropped and broke the chalk, they scribbled and scrawled. Eventually, experience  taught them that if they treated the chalk gently, it would remain whole. If they practiced their letters, then scrawls would become sentences.  (Still not sure how long it took to replace that chalk if it broke though- can you imagine not having a superstore within driving distances, or Amazon at your fingertips?)

Back to the pioneers. when the young child was handed a slate it was surrounded by a protective wood frame to prevent it from breaking. The child learned to clean their slate by running a wet cloth onto the surface, erasing away the mistakes and starting fresh to practice again and the lesson was leaned eventually.  Maybe it was how to make a letter, or it was a mathematical equation. With their cleaned slate and their experience from their previous work, they could have a more knowledgeable answer for the next problem or test. 

Each day offers a similiar experience for us. Have we forgotten in our modern existence that as the day draws to a close, we can wash our mind clean of any mistakes we may have encountered, we can lay the day to rest, making peace with the negative experiences. (If we aren't falling asleep while staring at the TV or surfing the web or playing candy crush- we can)-- everything has its place in our day but the end of the day is important for laying to rest what we can and cannot change about the day, and making peace with it, so we may rest well.

After which, we awake to a new day, a clean slate, a mind at peace with the experiences it has learned.  Our rested minds and bodies are then prepared to write the next day's experience with as much peace and strength as possible. 

Our minds and hearts and souls are fresh slates every new dawn.  

We are hardly handed chalk and slates anymore but the same is true of our screens.  They are our modern day chalk and slates.  No one in the pioneer days would have brought a heavy slate or messy chalk to a comfy clean bed. Why then, are we bringing our tablets and phones?  Why do we not want to lay ourselves to rest but to fall asleep with our mind in the middle of something.  It is important to acknowledge that the day has come to an end, when we ignore that simple fact, that simple unwinding, that internal laying to peace the complications of the day, then we may find ourselves waking during the night, restless with worry or with the heavy load of all our yesterdays right there, on our minds, at the beginning of each day.

What a heavy way to start, no wonder we need so much cofffee! 

Resolutions really start with treating ourselves gently, not harshly.  Just like the chalk and slate--we will remain whole, we will improve, we will be more peaceful, (notice we aren't saying perfect). Promise to prepare yourself for tonight, your human, you need to rest easy tonight, thereby preparing yourself for tomorrow's dawn.