New Year: A Celebration of Balance
The number of New Year’s resolutions that will be make as we usher out 2010 and launch the New Year will be almost as large as the number of people on the planet. If not consciously, then at least at some level, we all have expectations for the New Year – whether it is a series of goals in our career, or our personal life; one way or another, we are always hoping that the New Year will bring with it something, well... new.
Ultimately this means that we all have expectations for ourselves in the year ahead as well. Some ideas, plans and dreams will be realized and others won’t. Either way, it won’t stop almost all of us from making another set of resolutions the following year.
It’s a cycle that never ends. Why? Because it’s human nature. We never settle. We always keep striving. At any given time, there’s always a part of us, somewhere in the bowels of our mental engine, that is whirling away working towards a goal, and then the next, and the next. The consequences of this are both good and bad, however it doesn’t matter because it’s our nature. The important thing is not to attempt to overcome our nature, but to recognize and respect, and in turn maintain a balance.
Gratitude is the other dimension to our nature that the New Year also conjures up. Gratitude for what we have today, irrespective of any ambition for the future, is the ultimate acceptance of the world as it is and, therefore, the ultimate acceptance of ourselves.
Therein is the key to our happiness. We cannot immerse ourselves into it solely and attempt to become 100 percent happy, a hundred percent of the time, because the other side of our nature – the driven side – would automatically arise. Whether we recognized it or not, we’d proceed to push ourselves in the other direction. I am reminded of the story I heard from an experienced Buddhist teacher who told me of the time when he was in a Buddhist monastery with the aim of finding enlightenment, goallessness and inner peace. The desire to do it became so great that they started to compete with one another as to who could meditate the longest and reach various stages of practise first! All that competition seemed to make enlightenment a most unhappy business. They were, of course, defeating the objective.
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