Any Day Can Be New Year’s Day
When the clock strikes midnight on New Year’s Eve, the year changes.
With this shift comes a chance for rebirth. Dreams are spoken aloud, resolutions are made. Plans are set to bring growth and passion to the coming twelve months, those hopeful promises of a better future.
But the clock also strikes midnight 365 times a year.
And much like on the dawn of the new year, a new day arrives.
“One day or day one. You decide.”
Every day is a new year.
Each day arrives with a clean palate.
New opportunities. No mistakes. A fresh start.
Multiply that by 365, and you have 365 opportunities to reinvent yourself — to improve aspects of your health, lifestyle, career, and social relationships. You don’t need the new year to achieve that. All you need is to reframe your perspective of time and personal control.
After all, the new year is just a concept — a temporal social construct — and it doesn’t really exist. Likewise, the “fresh starts” promised by Mondays and March 1sts are only products of collective thought. Nothing but your own reluctance to act is holding you back from making a groundbreaking change at any other point in time during the year.
Sadly, many people end up losing steam and quitting their habits or goals because they allow themselves to be limited by these intangible concepts of time. If they can’t (or choose not to) grow at the pace they envisioned, they slow and halt somewhere in January and wait for the next year to pursue other resolutions. They rely on external changes rather than deciding to take charge of their own lives — what habit expert Stephen Covey would call being reactive instead of being proactive.
Don’t be like that. Instead of depending on New Year’s Day and waiting for the year to shift to be healthier or kinder or better, start today, or on Friday, or on March 10th, or at whatever other time that works for you.
After all, why give yourself only one chance to succeed, when every year carries hundreds of those opportunities?
Celebrating the New Day.
Without this sense of control, I might not have been where I am today.
But with the basic tenets underlying the New Day in mind, I managed to stop waiting and start doing:
- January 24th, 2023: I took the initiative to make a new friend
- February 14th, 2023: I started writing the first draft of my novel
- April 21st, 2023: I began learning about the business of online writing
- Summer, 2023: I decided that I wanted to get in to my dream university program a year earlier than initially planned (and worked harder the following two terms than ever before to get the grade average I needed, even though I could’ve chosen to wait a year and get in regardless)
- April, 2024: I started running again after almost a year of leg injuries
Each of these was like a New Day for me. I could have easily waited for the first day of the month — or the new year — to arrive. But I didn’t care that these days fell on odd-numbered dates or occurred in the middle of the week.
I only cared that they were new days.
And for that reason, they were precisely the right time to start.
This is my encouragement to you.
To treat each day as an opportunity to learn and grow.
If you fumbled yesterday, try again today. You don’t need the hour or the season to change in order to change yourself. As the wisdom goes, some flowers bloom in early spring, and others late in the fall.
Yet unlike flowers, you are not tethered to the fluctuations of time. You do not have to let the new year hold you back while you also let it inspire you. You can think about time in a new way and take your first step toward what you want from life.
When is up to you.
