It’s almost 2024!

The Nature of a Holiday

Holidays are charged times.  We have our traditions, perspectives and emotions for each of them. Often, society send messages telling us what we should feel during them. Holidays, although communal in many ways, are experienced individually. We each bring our past experiences, hopes and dreams to each of them. They are not like our every day. They stand out and provide many different and new experiences.

Holidays give us something different. A time to remember, commemorate or celebrate. They are closely entwined with the nature of a culture and its identity. They are distinct markers. They connect us year to year. They bring us together. They often nurture our relationships, although they can strain them too. The holidays bring us joy and stress, depending on how we experience them.

The new year holiday is just a few days away. It is a global holiday, acknowledged by the world. The holiday has developed to be one of remembrance, celebration, new beginnings and reflection. Resolutions are created for the coming year. Some want to party. Some seriously reflect on the year that is passing. The new year holiday is a passage from one calendar year to the next. There is a grounded reality about that.

An Opening Before Us All

Let’s look at the coming new year holiday as an Opening for all of us. It offers an opportunity for change. We are walking from one year into the next. We can make the new year holiday a more significant Opening by acknowledging what we want the new year to be. It is shaped as an Opening so we can release the past and embrace the present and future.

What’s gone is gone and new opportunities await us. Will we move into these new opportunities? As with any Opening, the choice is ours. We can enter this Opening, we can stay still and look back or we can pretend the Opening is not here and keep blithely walking as we were before. Why not enter it? We have agency and can move towards creating what we want the new year to be.

The coming year is ours to shape. Yes, circumstances and realities come into the new year with us. However, that does not preclude our adopting a positive attitude and realizing our influence over our own lives. We can create our lives by consciously responding to whatever occurs and by proactively setting our intention for what we want 2024 to be.

What Can We Do?

We can start by recognizing the next few days as an Opening. We can choose to define its nature and enter it. What do we want this Opening of a new year to be? Here are some questions we can ask ourselves:

• How is the new year an Opening for us?
• What opportunities in the new year do we already see?
• What do we need to make the most of this Opening?
• What potential does it have to change our lives?
• Do we like what we see in the Opening or are there things we want to change?
• Is anything holding us back? Is it a legitimate concern or unnecessary reluctance? What can we do in response to what is holding us back?

In my work with Lynn Andrews, she had us do an exercise at the beginning of each year that she called Life/Death Prayer Arrows. We would make two lists. In one list we would list anything we wanted to give away in the new year – things that no longer served us (an unlimited number of things). In the second list we would list ten things we wanted to bring into our life in the new year. We would take two sticks – on one we would attach our list of what we wanted to give away. We would decorate it appropriately and then we would burn it, to symbolize our giving away. Then, we would attach our list of what we wanted to bring into our life to another stick. We would decorate it appropriately and then put it in the ground as the “arrow” of our intention for the year.

Walk On Through

Let’s get on with the new year by entering the Opening it offers us. It’s there and we may as well take advantage of it. New things await us if we do.

I am excited by the new beginning this change from 2023 to 2024 offers me.  Might as well make the most of it. It truly is an Opening.

Thank you for reading Opening Blog. May the new year bring you fulfillment and joy! – Ann

photo:  Natalia_Kollegova, pixabay.com