Mid Into the Year and Still Not Late for New Year Resolutions.

It is mid into the new year for those of us who don’t care to keep pace with time. It is sometimes surprising when I wonder loudly in a meet up that, “oh! It is already June.” Most of the time I get a rather funny look implicating the weird idea I create in my friends minds. Perhaps some of them think that I am the most forgetful person they have ever met. They think I certainly compare with the professor who left his car in the University parking yard and went looking for it at home. But then I am open to myself most of the time.

For the rest of the cream, you only compare with my professor in the preceding paragraph when it comes to resolutions. If there is any one thing we keep as culture is the setting up of New Year Resolutions (NYR). Gone are the days when it came along with the once in a year merry of mandazis and chapatis. Nowadays those are everyday foods save for the NYR. It will still remain top of the list for those things we always look forward to set come the New Year.

I don’t know if you have ever noticed how faithful we become with setting those resolutions and then we forget to even do an audit come end of the year. If you did an audit of your resolutions for the past five years, you might realize that there are resolutions that keep cropping up after every year. You wonder why it has never been achieved or kept. It simply true that we are good at setting up the aspirations and rarely look into ways of helping us achieve them.

So it is important we remind ourselves that it is already June, what we ideally call half into the year. We should ask ourselves the first and most pertinent question, “What have I achieved so far in regards to my resolutions?” And then we need to ask ourselves a second important question, “What have I not achieved and how do I go about it?” With these two questions, we can be able to keep track of the goals we have accomplished and what we have not. With that knowledge, we can then plan our remaining part of the year carefully.

For example if you wanted to have an asset in your name, it is not late. We still have a whole five months for you to purchase even a radio. Is a radio an asset in the first place? I don’t think, but depending on how you perceive assets, have it to your fit. By end year a lot of things could have happened. You could have turned a year old and become a year old wiser. A warning though is that you don’t become wiser automatically.

A wise old man once told me, “Son, becoming old does not mean you are wise, yet being young does not mean you are foolish or less wise.” Why then is the council of elders back in my village considered a high affinity wise top group? The wise man answered me satisfactorily, “In that council, the unwise old men get encompassed in the wisdom of the often majority wise men. That is why it is a council and if you observe keenly, not all of them speak at the village meetings.” I learnt a priceless lesson from that interaction. It is this lesson that I thought of when I started to write this piece.

We all have our shortcomings. We reach a point in life when we feel like all we have to do is to give up and let go. At such a point we need some hope, which is in very short supply in our world today. We need then to have a way in which we can mask ourselves in the glory of others. I mean that if we had set up as a resolution to get married this year, and it is mid-year with no prospects, then it becomes important to rise up to the resolution itself.

If you have not been participating in friend’s weddings, you better start participating. Maybe you have been too busy to notice prospects, it is time to take a break a little and get out there and get together with friends who had same resolutions and have achieved theirs or are on the way towards achieving them. You can learn from them on how they did it which can help you in a way or two.

A fact remains that you cannot succeed alone. You need other people to help you or to succeed together with. It is true that we are not all wise and know-it-all. So once we appreciate such a simple fact we give ourselves a chance to learn and this is perhaps the most important part towards achieving our New Year resolutions.

For instance I decided for this year that I was going to write an article each week. Few days into the year I realized that I often got overwhelmed with other things and thought of changing my resolution. Then it struck me that I could not do it alone. I then looked around and found the individuals who could hold me accountable to my goals and gave them the go ahead of making sure I did an article each week. I also realized that friends could come up with suggested topics I can use in my writings. I have been faithful to this far. What am I putting across? That you don’t have to kill yourself with all the goals alone, use those around you.

In fact at some point I had as many as twenty resolutions. I later decided to reduce them to a manageable number. I either compressed them or pushed the not so important ones to coming years because to get to achieve our goals, we must first identify ourselves with them. If you can’t remember them, you better shed them off, and if you remember them then they are very important to you and you better work them out. If you have achieved them all, you can set up new mid year goals and hence you better have greater ones in the coming years. It could be that you set the bar too low which is not good for the ambitious dreamers.

Half into the year, and we have the other half to work our goals out. Go down and do an audit of them all and classify them according to necessity if need be. Go ahead and involve those around you to find the best approaches to make you achieve them. If it is collaborations, use it. And you don’t need to necessarily tell them that they are helping you achieve your goal because chances are you are helping them achieve theirs in another way too.

I hope when the year comes to an end we can celebrate the year and look forward to another new year. Not because we are supposed to celebrate and look forward to new years but because we achieved our goals and can’t wait to set the bar a little bit high and go for it.

End