A Doctor’s New Year’s Resolutions

You would be forgiven for rolling your eyes at someone asking you about New Year’s Resolutions, even on a “normal” New Year’s Eve.

After the past 2 years of tragedy and loss, it can feel trite to turn our attention to a practice so often relegated to self-improvement, when around us people have been suffering, have been dying. 

You would be forgiven for wanting to lie down and forget too. I know how tired we all are. Sleeping’s Beauty’s 100 year sleep is looking less and less like a curse and more like blissful escape.

The effect of loss

Here’s the thing though.. All that loss? It has brought our lives, our values and priorities, into laser sharp focus. 👁

Many of us are realising, maybe for the first time, what really matters to us… 

It’s like the old adage “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.” 

Sometimes we only recognise what our values are when someone or something is stopping us from honouring them. 

What now?

We could allow ourselves to be Sleeping Beauties..

Or we can allow this tragedy to mean something more than pain, loss and absence.

We can resist the urge to submit to tiredness and to lapse into numbness and inertia and instead..

We can turn that laser sharp focus into a life not wasted, for everyone who didn’t get the chance. 

Where do we start?

❌ Retire the idea of New Year’s Resolution as a self-improvement practice.

🔥 Instead of trying to improve on an old version of ourselves, let’s raze that “vision board” to the ground and start with a blank slate.

🔄 Allow the realisations brought into stark relief by so much loss become a turning point. 

⚡️Let’s take stock of where we are and who we are by summoning the energy to ask ourselves the tough questions:

🌟 What matters to me?

🌟 What values have been brought to my attention throughout this pandemic, either because I appreciated their presence, or railed against their absence?

🌟 Does the life I’m living now put these values front and centre?

🌟 If not, why not? 

🌟 How can I build a new life around these values, instead of trying to fix what’s already there?

The single best way I can think of for one life to honour the loss of so many others is to make that life worth living. 

Maybe not today, or next week, but as soon as we can muster the energy. 

~ Dr N xx