Shocking Yourself into 2016

As I sit to think about and write this blog post, I can’t help but have in mind the countless social media postings, memes, lists, and reflections that I’m about to see on my friends’ pages.  I will get a chance to see their “Years in Review,” their “Friends’ Favorite Pictures of them,” and perhaps more than a few words about how good or lousy 2015 was to them.  That’s all fine and good because often the end of a year simply causes us to reflect on our most recent pasts and our quickly approaching futures.  The end of a number – because, after all, what else is a year but an invented number in the endlessness of universal time? – immediately causes us to think linearly and to see the results of cause-and-effect, and get us to think about what we did right or what we did wrong. 

              What I think would be much more helpful for all of us is to think of the next week and a half as a time for reflection.  I don’t mean the simple thinking about what we could have done better.  I mean the profound contemplative reflection that only a true act of introspection can bring. Introspection is not something one does in a minute or even an hour.  It is a process, sometimes painstakingly real, and it is a process that too many people have no idea how to face.  What I propose is simple, think about the past year in terms of lessons learned and connections made (or broken).  As Sandy, an exemplary young woman most recently realized, sometimes the best and most important lessons are those born out of experiences that shock us into thought and into self-evaluation. Don’t be afraid to be shocked into thinking about things greater than yourself and about the material world around you. Don’t resist the call to evaluate yourself and your role in the universe.  After all, is there anything more important than the realization that you are part – a cog perhaps – in what is the great machine we call life?  Let this be the opportunity in which you do that for yourself and for the people around you.

              So, how to think about the past twelve months? The reality of 2015 is this.  It was a year in which you learned how to love yourself just a little bit more. The year taught you a little more about what you like and what you don’t like, about what you can tolerate and what you won’t, about what your dreams should be and what they no longer are.  It is a time to raise that glass to everyone you knew throughout the year simply because each one of them – even the haters – taught you a little more about yourself, and it is that little bit that might just be enough to get you through this arduous journey called life, however long that might be.  Each one of those persons has contributed to the person you are today. Each one has caused you to react, to respond, to care, to experience emotion, to relate, to socialize, and to live.  Each one, existentially speaking, lives in you whether you wish it to be true or not.

               Look, then, at the year that’s about to end differently.  In 2015 you learned who your real friends are.  You learned who loves you for who you are and not for what you can do for them.  You learned that each breath you take leads to an action, a thought, a word that you can never take back.  You learned that you’re paying today for the decisions you made yesterday.  You learned that tomorrow’s decision has to be based on your experiences.  You learned that you’re capable of surviving what you most feared this past year.  You learned that you’re stronger than you thought.  You learned to prioritize yourself and your life just a little more.  You learned that the world does not end just because you lost a love.  You learned that you are who you are regardless of what life throws at you and, at the end of the day, no one can take that away.  That is exactly what your gift to the world is:  you…and the talents, the dreams, the motives you bring with you.  Hopefully, these are what will make the world a better place tomorrow than when you go to sleep tonight.  For 2016, utilize and manipulate these shock experiences to get you to be the solution you so desperately want to see in the world.  You have exactly 365 days in which to do it.  What will your small contribution be?  What lesson are you going to make real for the rest of us to witness?  In the end, it’s your call.  Make 2016 yours.