Every year is the same, we spend the Christmas period reflecting on the year before and then the New Year setting out new goals and resolutions and telling everyone about them, ending every sentence with ‘new year, new me’ and writing a diary for three days, starting dry January only to finish it three days later…
But worse than January 1 is New Year’s Eve – a day far enough away from Christmas to have restored our energy, and close enough to the abyss that is January that we feel the need to overdo it on the fun while we’ve still got a few days off work.
This is the day people can’t see the difference between expectation and reality, close friend and social media.
This, rather perfectly, results in a boastful status update summing up the year’s highlights, followed by a maudlin announcement five hours later that their friends don’t love them and NYE is devastatingly overrated.
This year for me I reflected in a different way and set myself different expectations. I made a promise to myself, a promise to do things differently. I promised myself that I wouldn’t live my life in fast forward, trying to be Miss perfect and be all things to all people and not pleasing me.
For 2015, I decided I would like to try and live in the present moment…
I decided that I want to be in the day that I’m living right now as it’s the only day I get. Period. I can resolve to be thin when next July rolls around, or to stop drinking for a month, or to go to the gym 5 times a week but I decided that I can go on resolving until the cows come home, and I still have to live my precious life just like everyone else on the planet: One day at a time.
I realised upon my reflection that I waste so much time thinking ahead, thinking about things that actually never happen – that meeting a week on Tuesday, ordering the shopping, that work problem, what will I do about this, that and the other that I was missing precious moments throughout the day: my daughters sweet words, a gorgeous sunset, a conversation with a friend and I was only half listening to, the birds singing, the sunrise, the list is quite endless.
So how am I going to live in the present moment this year?
I’m going to slow down, not let others expectations and emotion influence me, focus on one thing at once, create new habits and live moment to moment. I will work on my goals day to day rather than weeks and months in advance. This is something I realise will take time and practice as I have to reverse all my bad habits and train my monkey mind to be different. This in itself will be good for me as I am quite impatient by nature.
15 days in to 2015 and I have made a great start, I am really very proud of what I have experienced working day to day – I am forming a new habit of meditating daily with the help of my new app Anamaya, learning to be a little more mindful and I have also taken to daily yoga too. 15 days is really a massive achievement for me as I’m usually bored by now! The exciting thing is, this feels different, I’m not bored or struggling with my new routine. I am already experiencing benefits with my new attitude, I can slowly see changes happening, noticing new things, feeling a lot calmer, more patient and more focused. I’m so amazed that this can happen in just 15 days, it’s made me more determined than ever to live in the moment and continue to practice my new habits!
So for 2015, there is a change in me from many more years, a change for the better. I fully realise that changes are gradual and this is something we can all do day to day rather than year to year and in doing so, we really start living.
I’m determined to spread a little mindfulness through the 10 team.
Kate Gledhill
Senior Account Manager, 10 Associates