A Thought for New Year

Happy New Year!

I pray blessings on you all this coming year ... may it be a peaceful, healthy, and happy 2024 for you!

It's interesting, isn't it ... how we put so much store in the passing of this one day into another?

Is there anything 'special' about January 1st really? After all, it IS just another day. The sun rises every day and every day we are presented with another 24 hours and we may decide to either spend it well and wisely, or not.

Of course, there IS something significant about the start of a New Year because it allows us an opportunity to stop, and think, if only for a moment in the midst of the mayhem of partying (if that's your thing).

We may think on the year that has passed, the people we have been blessed with, the kindnesses we have experiences, the loved ones we have lost not just in the past 12 months but before that ... people who were once part of our New Year, and who like us, once started their year with hope and happiness and yearnings, and laughter and tears.

At New Year we may take time to give thanks for all the blessings we have. As a person of Christian faith, I give thanks to the Almighty for everything I've been granted in this life and pray that I may be aware of His presence and guidance in the unfolding days.

But then, I ask myself ... surely I should be doing that EVERY morning? That sort of gratitude should be for every day.

I have a calendar which is full of helpful mindfulness thoughts - some religious, most not - which I have in my kitchen and which I find inspirational. Having walked through last year with it, this morning (on January 1st), I have turned it back to the start of the year. I will travel with it again in 2024 ... perhaps gaining new insights from every daily thought the second time around.

And before this year really gets underway, I am reminded about the importance of greeting each new day, not just New Year's Day, with that sense of gratitude for the time we are given on this earth. And to make EACH day a blessed day full of opportunities, love and gratitude, kindness, wellbeing and success and happiness and contentment ... and whatever we wish for ourselves, dream of and pray for.

In the words of the philosopher poet Ralph Waldo Emerson ... whose wise words were the thought for Dec 31st on my calendar.

'Write it on your heart ... that every day is the best day of the year'

Be blessed everyone!