Same Old New Year

It was only on seeing the gym packed way beyond its normal level on 2nd January, that I realised quite how seriously many people take the 'new year, new me' motto. 

The beginning of a new year definitely seems like the best opportunity for a fresh start; a chance to put past problems behind you, and a whole heap of time to achieve whatever you were dreaming of the year before. I sometimes wonder though whether or not we might be placing a small bit too much pressure and expectation on what is essentially only a calendar date. 

Although 2015 held a lot of milestones for me (and 2016 promises even more) I still find myself pretty much unchanged, and in many of the same situations as I have done before. For a while I was disappointed that I couldn't pinpoint any dramatic differences to separate the years, but realistically, those sorts of changes don't happen overnight. New Year's Resolutions and the like are all great ways of bringing ambitions and goals into focus, but it strikes me that they can also create pressure and a fear of failure if we expect them to start materialising on 1st January of any given year. We've all got aspects of our lives that we want to work on and improve, but for the most part that takes time and effort. Will 2016 be the year we see massive change, or will it be the year that lays the foundation for it? Do we even know what we want that change to be? I'm not sure I do.  

Either way, here's not just to this January, or even this year, but to the future; to growing and developing at our own paces, and (slowly but) surely becoming the people we want to be...