The New Year: Ring it in with Purpose

Well, the New Year is upon us.

As we maneuver our way through this holiday season and the New Year, it is a great time to reflect on the past year's accomplishments, the challenges & even the stumbles.  If I may offer one piece of advice...  make your purpose in doing so to evaluate where you stand and then take the time to set and update your personal and professional goals for the next year and beyond.  Make this time an opportunity.  Cause the New Year to be a meaningful event and not simply a passing date.  Use it as inspiration or motivation or an excuse to expand your education. How about a joyful goodbye to your recent past simply to release yourself from the bondage of regret.  Somehow this holiday allows us to actually forget yesterday and move on as if it never existed.  Taking advantage of it can move you forward to a new beginning, taking it for granted lets it go by the wayside with no change in course.  In reality though, January 1 really is no different than any other day on which you can decide to be a better you, build a better life, repair a damaged relationship or build new better ones.  It's no different than waking up on say, a Tuesday, and deciding for yourself that "Today's the Day"... whatever that day may be or mean for you.  The point is to design it on purpose.

Maybe this New Year is the year you stop letting life happen to you & begin making it happen for you.  This year can provide whatever it is you need, whatever it is you're looking for.

Perhaps some wit, advice, hope or timeless wisdom can provide you with a little guidance in finding what it is you need.  Whatever it may be, the following are some thoughts from those wiser than me.  

My fondest wishes for you is to make this your best year... yet!  Reach further than you have before.

Glory to God in highest heaven,
Who unto man His Son hath given;
While angels sing with tender mirth,
A glad new year to all the earth.
~Martin Luther


Youth is when you're allowed to stay up late on New Year's Eve.  Middle age is when you're forced to.  ~Bill Vaughn

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in.  A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.  ~Bill Vaughan

Many people look forward to the new year for a new start on old habits.  ~Author Unknown

A New Year's resolution is something that goes in one year and out the other.  ~Author Unknown

Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.  ~Benjamin Franklin

No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.  It is that from which all date their time, and count upon what is left.  It is the nativity of our common Adam.  ~Charles Lamb

New Year's Day is every man's birthday.  ~Charles Lamb

Never tell your resolution beforehand, or it's twice as onerous a duty.  ~John Selden

Year's end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.  ~Hal Borland

The merry year is born
Like the bright berry from the naked thorn.
~Hartley Coleridge

New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.  ~Hamilton Wright Mabie

The Old Year has gone.  Let the dead past bury its own dead.  The New Year has taken possession of the clock of time.  All hail the duties and possibilities of the coming twelve months!  ~Edward Payson Powell

Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.  ~Oprah Winfrey

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1850

The proper behavior all through the holiday season is to be drunk.  This drunkenness culminates on New Year's Eve, when you get so drunk you kiss the person you're married to.  ~P.J. O'Rourke

Every man should be born again on the first day of January.  Start with a fresh page.  Take up one hole more in the buckle if necessary, or let down one, according to circumstances; but on the first of January let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.  ~Henry Ward Beecher

New Year's Day:  Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.  ~Mark Twain

The new year begins in a snow-storm of white vows.  ~George William Curtis

For last year's words belong to last year's language
And next year's words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.  ~Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink and swore his last oath.  Today, we are a pious and exemplary community.  Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient shortcomings considerably shorter than ever.  ~Mark Twain

People are so worried about what they eat between Christmas and the New Year, but they really should be worried about what they eat between the New Year and Christmas.  ~Author Unknown

And ye, who have met with Adversity's blast,
And been bow'd to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass'd
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury -
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
~Thomas Hood

Drop the last year into the silent limbo of the past.  Let it go, for it was imperfect, and thank God that it can go.  ~Brooks Atkinson

Each age has deemed the new-born year
The fittest time for festal cheer.
~Walter Scott

Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.  ~Oscar Wilde

A new oath holds pretty well; but... when it is become old, and frayed out, and damaged by a dozen annual retryings of its remains, it ceases to be serviceable; any little strain will snap it.  ~Mark Twain, speech in New York City, 31 March 1885

But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty?  I live according to twenty-year-old habits.  ~Andre Gide

When then is lost, as time is by,
we look upon the yearly wine
to see our substance in the lees.
Did tribe and purse most pleasing leave?
To look for clear and faithful sense,
that gives a bodied stance bouquet,
then see the vat at mirror's face
and find in it, the yearly pace.
~E. Marshall, Vintner Epilogue (Happy Old Year)

I do think New Year's resolutions can't technically be expected to begin on New Year's Day, don't you?  Since, because it's an extension of New Year's Eve, smokers are already on a smoking roll and cannot be expected to stop abruptly on the stroke of midnight with so much nicotine in the system.  Also dieting on New Year's Day isn't a good idea as you can't eat rationally but really need to be free to consume whatever is necessary, moment by moment, in order to ease your hangover.  I think it would be much more sensible if resolutions began generally on January the second.  ~Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones's Diary

New Year's Eve, where auld acquaintance be forgot.  Unless, of course, those tests come back positive.  ~Jay Leno

We meet today
To thank Thee for the era done,
And Thee for the opening one.
~John Greenleaf Whittier

One resolution I have made, and try always to keep, is this:  To rise above the little things.  ~John Burroughs

Of all sound of all bells... most solemn and touching is the peal which rings out the Old Year.  ~Charles Lamb

A happy New Year! Grant that I
May bring no tear to any eye
When this New Year in time shall end
Let it be said I've played the friend,
Have lived and loved and labored here,
And made of it a happy year.
~Edgar Guest

It wouldn't be New Year's if I didn't have regrets.  ~William Thomas

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential.  ~Ellen Goodman

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year's resolutions.  ~Joey Adams

He who breaks a resolution is a weakling;
He who makes one is a fool.
~F.M. Knowles

The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year.  It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes.  Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make no resolutions.  Unless a man starts afresh about things, he will certainly do nothing effective. ~G.K. Chesterton

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's.  ~Henry Moore

Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year.  Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.  ~Thomas Mann

I made no resolutions for the New Year.  The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.  ~Anaïs Nin

New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.  ~Mark Twain

Every man regards his own life as the New Year's Eve of time.  ~Jean Paul Richter

And yet even more quips, tips & pontification for the new year can be found at:  http://ow.ly/QLPZ