The New Year

"Last time I was here it was raining.
It ain't raining anymore."
-Ryan Adams, Dirty Rain



It is the first day of January, and my run this morning was dominated by the bright sunrise in a clear sky.  In this season of goals, resolutions, and the desire to improve ourselves, I was struck by the perfect appropriateness of this (not to mention nature's love for clichés).  I believe we find messages in things when we look for them, and that our expectations will define the message we find.  A man in a dour mood would call that sun blinding, for example, and point instead to the cutting wind as an omen of a cruel year to come.

That said, how could I not look upon the blue sky and golden sun without finding a sense of optimism for the new year?  It was as if nature herself were smiling hopefully.

I've never been one to embrace the "New Year's" spirit.  I like to think I am already committed to continuously improving myself (especially this past year), and that New Year's Resolutions are really just for people without the willpower to maintain their good habits.  Moreover, as my friend Tanya pointed out, these resolutions tend to "give [us] nothing but a self-worth disorder."  It has become a great joke that New Year's Resolutions are doomed to fail, like marriages where the spouses get tattoos of each other's names.

This these past few days, though, I've realized that there really is no bad time for resolving to improve yourself.  In the business world, the evangelists of continuous improvement are always looking for more bottlenecks to be unblocked and positive changes to be made.  By definition, continuous improvement is never finished.  The New Year simply provides a convenient time to set new goals and a convenient timeframe in which to meet them.  The smartest goals have a strict time component; while a deadline includes a risk of failure, the lack of one leads to procrastination.

This also led me to another realization about myself.  Sure, I'm an advocate of self-improvement and do look for constructive ways to make myself a better person.  But I'm terrible about setting goals, which is probably the single most effective way to make a change.  I am a master of procrastination, which is why I started this blog weeks ago and am only now adding another entry.

So, I'm going to use this "season" to set some concrete goals for myself, both in terms of running and a few other things (including keeping up with this blog!).  The running goals are pretty easy to make--I can couch them in terms of time, speed, or miles--but might be hard to hit.  I want to add at least five additional miles per week, and improve my 5K and 10K time by one and two minutes, respectively.  I'm looking forward to that challenge.  Personal goals are difficult, since they tend to be more abstract and the habits more deeply entrenched.  I'm also reticent about sharing some of those with the world, but I may change my mind about that.  I plan to share some of my successes and failures along the way, and also hope that putting all of this out in cyberspace will keep me accountable.

Finally, while we usually look to the new year as a time for positive change, it also reminds us that we can put the past behind us.  We can break bad habits, stop making the same mistakes, or take control of our lives where we thought we'd lost it.  Even when faced with challenges outside of our control, we have a remarkable ability to adapt to circumstance.  No matter how bad the night may have been, the sun is still going to rise on a new day.