With the New Year we long for a fresh start. We want to wipe the slate clean, removing the smudges and the smears. We want to get rid of the errors, the poor choices, the misguided decisions and the bruising flops that populated the previous year. We want to wipe away old habits, clean up destructive behaviors, sponge up toxic relationships, run away from blood-sucking jobs and frantically flee the debt-feeding financial decisions that we made. The New Year is our time to use a whole bunch of elbow grease to clean up the horrendous messes of the old year, sweep those dirty little choices under the carpet, smooth over places where the carnage of our decisions tore the landscape of our lives apart, and precariously prop up the things that were blown over by the selfish choices we made. We’re wildly busy about the ‘spit and polish’ of getting everything tight and clean.
We want to expunge the memory of the people that we hurt from the recess of our ever-annoying conscience, or work hard to pretend that whatever we did to them wasn’t really all that bad. We don’t really want to acknowledge that we made wildly stupid choices along the way that had absolutely no foresight or hindsight, rather writing all the collateral damage off to the welcome scapegoat of misfortune, a tough economy, fate, chance, a fat chance, or the poor choices of others. We want to vigorously shake off the mishaps of the past year, rigorously brushing them off the sleeves of our lives so that they’re left behind in whatever place we’ve been in order to be free of them in whatever place we’re going.
The New Year
Clean Slate or Simply Stale?
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