With the new year ringing in, millions of people vow to turn their lives around and hold fervantly to their New Year's resolutions. People vow to stick to diets, develop better study habits, meet their one true love, save the world, quit smoking, and even get their Hogwarts letter in the mail before summer ends. True, some of these goals are attained in a year's time, but on the flip side of the coin, it's absolutely astonishing how many New Year's resolutions fail because either the goal holds too much impossibility or that the person making the resolution instantly forgets about his or her resolution a few weeks (or in some cases, a few days) after making it. Am I saying that New Year's resolutions are stupid and fruitless? Not at all. It's excellent to set goals so that we may constantly strive to achieve them. I'm saying, think carefully about your New Year's resolution and prepare to follow through with it. Make it realistic, so don't beat yourself up when you follow the path for absolute flawlessness or perfection--perfection is pretty impossible to attain anyhow. Plan to follow through with your goal and keep it stored in your mind as you progress through the year. By the way, it's also a pretty good idea to write it down in case you do let it slip your mind. Making resolutions means hope for improvement. I believe that we can always strive to improve ourselves and work towards the goal of achieving our "ideal self." Maybe I sound too much like a humanistic psychologist, but perhaps it's the path to a meaningful life. Back about a month ago when I was preparing for a debate, a friend of mine and I discussed the definition of what it meant to have a meaningful life. Many people equate a successful life with a meaningful life. I admit that I certainly did about a year ago when I made my New Year's resolution to achieve much more success in 2012. True, I met that resolution, and I'm certainly more successful than I was before. Look at me now: five foot one young woman with a lengthy résumé that threatens to stretch longer than two pages with my added accomplishments in poetry, art, writing, music, and academics. But am I closer to ideal happiness with all my accomplishments? Not really. At the bottom of this blog, I'm posting a video that definitely made me reevaluate the idea of success. If anything, I've learned how I must balance out everything to merge closer to a meaningful life. Last year, I burnt my candle at both ends always working and studying and practicing and not really taking a chance to enjoy the other things around me. All I knew last year was stress and deadlines and how to keep pushing through each day to strive toward a larger goal. But where was anything involving enjoying life outside of work? While I did have many great moments of sheer enjoyment last year, most of my days were dominated by "do this," "finish this," and "who needs a break when you can keep up the pace and continue studying?" We, as human beings, can't always be working. We need down time/fun time/chill time. Life isn't about the destination of our success; it's about the journey we take to success. It's important to live each day with some form of happiness making each day important to ourselves. Praying for the end of the day or just a method of survival is no way to live. Life life with meaning. In 2013, I want to slow down a little and enjoy some time with friends and seek out a meaningful life. Oh, I'll still continue building my résumé, but I just want to stop stressing about every little thing to make it absolutely perfect. Life's too short to overstress. This year, I'm going to balance out my life and merge closer to a meaningful life.
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AuthorKendall Driscoll is an accomplished writer/ musician/ artist/ academic scholar. Archives
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