Happy New Year!

Image by Yelena Ledovskaya

Happy New Year, everyone! New year, you say? Wasn’t that over a month ago? Yes and no. The New Year of the solar calendar took place on January 1st but the Lunar New Year changes every year. This year, it fell on Tuesday, February 5th—today.

I absolutely love New Year’s Day. As Elizabeth Gilbert shared in her recent live event with Rob Bell, it’s the most generous day of the year. It’s the one day where you get to let go of everything that happened in the previous year and begin anew. You haven’t screwed up yet! You have another chance to make things right; you have another chance to live in more alignment with your true self.

But often, I feel that New Year’s Day comes too fast! Common, I just finished the crazy holiday season with Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas…just give me a little break here! Which is why, I have often seen the Lunar New Year as my real fresh start. It’s far enough away from the holidays that I actually get a chance to decompress, engage in serious self-reflection and set intentions for the new year. Aaaaand, this lunar new year is especially exciting for me because it’s the year of the pig! It’s my year! For those of you who don’t know much about Chinese astrology, there are twelve animals that are designated to each year. Every twelve years, the calendar resets and it’s a new era.  

It is commonly believed that when your year rolls around, it is especially a prosperous year filled with great fortune for you. 2007, the last year of the Pig, was an unbelievably fortunate year for me. I got admitted to the school of my dreams, Yale Divinity School (with a full scholarship!) and I met the guy who would become my husband, James. It was the year where I felt like all of my dreams came true. So…I have some pretty high hopes for 2019 (HAHAHAHA).

I’m not superstitious but I do like to make meaning out of these abstract and human constructed symbols. Like the arbitrary January 1st date, it’s helpful in providing a time to take stock of how we’ve been living, re-route ourselves if we feel we’ve gone off-course and just dream.   

I’m not going to lie. Despite my big hahahah above, I admit I do have some crazy big dreams. At the same time, I recognize that many of them will most likely not happen this year, although I do hope to have them set in motion this year. As you know from my January 1st post, I’m a big believer of small steps that lead to big results or said another way, dreaming big and acting small.

In addition to the big dream I have set for myself this new year, I have also chosen a phrase to help center and guide me whenever I get off-track or impatient. People have shared with me how effective it is for them to choose one word to focus them in a new year or a new phase of life. In that vein of thought, I have chosen one phrase instead of one word. That is: slow and steady wins the race. Whenever I get impatient because I’m not seeing results or I just want to have my dreams realized in the here and now, I will remember this phrase and repeat it to myself: slow and steady wins the race.

Happy New Year, everybody!