Raise Your Glass!

At this time of year, the world is full of the festive spirit. The holidays are in the rear window and the New Year is coming. What are your plans? What are your resolutions? We are living in the rewind cycle of the year that just was.  Every television station has retrospectives of the year in review in entertainment, news, lives lived and lost, and we can get stuck there. There is healthy reflection and then there is unhealthy reflection.

Whether you are going through divorce or not, New Year’s Eve brings with it a lot of baggage. Do you have a community of people to celebrate with? What are your plans anyway? Isn’t New Year’s Eve just a made up holiday anyway?

When you are going through divorce it can be even harder. The year that was may be the year that everything blew up. You look back and ask yourself, what happened? Or maybe you ask, why did it take so long? Or worry, what’s next?  And here we are at New Year’s Eve, and somehow, we feel like we are supposed to know.

Taking stock doesn’t have to be something to be scared of. It can be a positive action. What are you proud of over the past year? What actions did you take that moved your life forward? What actions did you take that could have missed the mark and you might do differently the next time? When did you dig deep and find courage to make decisions that you had been afraid of in the past? When did you face that fear, look it in the eye, and move through it? And when didn’t you face it? Because sometimes we all run away from decisions. We delay. We put them on pause. But as Carl Jung says, “What we resist, persists.”  The longer we avoid the hard decisions, the difficult choices, the larger they will loom before us.

So let’s face New Year’s Eve with a new perspective. Put on the silly 2024 tiara. Get out the noise maker and raise a glass. This year you made some hard decisions. Maybe the decisions were not your choice, maybe they were.  You are still here, and you are awesome. This is the time to do the hard world of realigning with your soul values. It is not easy work, but it is powerful. Remember who you are at your best. Look in the mirror. And as Pink so loudly chants, “raise your glass.”