Happy New Year Extended
We like to wish people "Happy New Year," and we mean it. We want people to be healthy, to enjoy their lives, to have meaningful work and relationships. Along with the happy new year wishes I've received, this from author and teacher, Lee Klinger Lesser and psychologist, Mirta Medici, appealed to my desire to expand and deepen my reflection on what a happy new year might also look like.
Lee Klinger Lesser writes:
"As we begin this new year, 2018, we can reflect with fresh eyes and an open heart on how we are being true to our own potential and where we are stuck and hindering ourselves. Even in the midst of pain and difficulty there is joy and opportunity. It is never one or the other. The more we can value our lives just as they are and connect to what is needed, the more fully we can live, support the people we love, and engage where we can be most useful.
"It feels crucial not to get lost in despair or powerlessness. I recognize that energy arises and recharges in me, when I focus on what I can do, not what I can't do.
"I refuse to be hijacked by dissension, ugliness, and division. I trust the depth of what connects us. And that is where I will devote my time, energy and capacity.
"A student from Spain sent me a New Year's greeting she found on Facebook from a psychologist named Mirta Medici. I think these are profound wishes for the new year, so I am offering my best translation from the Spanish here:"
"I don't wish you a marvelous new year filled with all good things. That is a magical, infantile, utopian thought.
"I wish that you become energized to see yourself, and that you love yourself as you are. That you have enough self-love to fight many battles, and the humility to know which battles are impossible to win and are not worth the struggle.
"I wish that you can accept that there are unchangeable realities; and there are others, that if you leave the place of complaining, you can change. That you don't permit yourself the "I can't" and you recognize the "I don't want to's".
"I wish that you listen to your own truth and you speak it, with full awareness that it is only your truth, not the truth of others. That you expose yourself to what you fear, because it is the only way to overcome fear.
"That you learn to tolerate the "black spots" of others, because you have your own, and this rescinds the possibility of complaint or blame. That you don't condemn yourself for making mistakes, you are not all-powerful.
"That you grow, as fully and as far as you are ready to grow.
"I don't send you wishes that 2018 will bring you happiness. I wish that you discover how to be happy, no matter what reality is yours to live."
HAPPY NEW YEAR
Photograph: Milky Way Over Harvey Dam, Western Australia.
One of the Top 25 Photos on Flickr in 2017 From Around the world
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