Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! Welcome, 2012! We have in front of us 365 days, 52 weeks, and four seasons until the next year. It is an endless time of possibility, opportunity, and discovery that is at our very fingertips, and the promise of a happy new year is enough to encourage anyone to enjoy it!

As a child, I always had a hard time writing my new years resolutions; something about sitting down with a pencil and a blank sheet of paper made it dry and not very meaningful. But my mother always reminds me to take a moment and think about the year—the one that’s gone, and the one that is to come. Take a moment, I advise you, to think of what you have learned that you want, what you’ve learned that you love, and how you think that knowing these things can make you happier and make your year more important. Even though I haven’t always written New Year’s resolutions, I have always thought about them, but this year I have decided to actually write them out and try my hardest to follow them! If you would like to—for a new year is always a new chance—I encourage you to try to do the same.

After all, there is something ridiculously exciting about finally doing something that you’ve wanted to do for months—or even years.

A friend of mine from tennis and I talked about getting pedicures together for over 11 months. An unfortunate side effect of tennis, you see, is that while it keeps your body in shape, your feet aren’t so lucky. Therefore, we’d decided to get pedicures in order to spare everyone the duty of looking at our marvelous “tennis feet”. We’d tried and tried to schedule them—at least three times—and we finally did it! Yesterday, to be exact. Of course, we then realized that we’d finally done something that we’d wanted to do for about a year—and on the last day of that year, too! With fewer than nine hours to spare, we achieved our goal, and saved our feet!

While not all of our goals can be so easily accomplished, our pedicures yesterday serve as a good reminder: we can always find time to do the things we really want to do. There’s no reason to discredit your goals—whether if it’s to paint your nails, get into a certain college, or even try out a new recipe in the kitchen and not blow up the oven. Therefore, in this New Year, TRY things! Have fun! Help someone, or some cause, or something—and do it because you want to, not because you should.  Place no limits! Even phrasing things in a different way can make any task seem less daunting (for example: don’t say “don’t be late”. Instead, say “be early”; by giving ourselves a positive reference, we are less stressed out and happier).

And most of all, never, ever forget. Do not forgot that this is a completely New Year, and it is replete with chances, choices, fun, friends, family, risks, and all the wonderful parts of life. The bad things could happen, too—they always can. But if you focus on the good parts—the things you want to do and can do—we always have something wonderful just waiting to happen.

So here is your mission, should you choose to accept it:

It’s 2012. Make it good. Make it real. Make it fun!