New Year, Another Chance

Hi and Welcome to the A & J PEI Treasures E Jean Simpson Author Blog Post and Podcast. I’m your host, Jean coming to you from the beautiful Province of Prince Edward Island, Canada!! The blog post and podcast is an opinion piece and only reflects this author’s opinion and not that of any other entity. I hold no designations in politics, economics or medicine. I am retired from the mental health field. I am a humanitarian and speak from that viewpoint only. Whether you agree with me or not, at least I hope it makes you think. This week, I talk about the things that shaped 2022 and my hopes for 2023. Wishing you all a happy and healthy New Year! If you want to find out more, then stay tuned…!

I was thinking that so much happened in 2022. Some of the missteps included a lot of political mistakes…everything from the huge faux pas using First Nations experience to describe first world problems, to deaths in the New Brunswick health care system. Then there was the take-over of Twitter. This resulted in a lot of changes and a lot of back tracking of some of those changes. The world is not the place I grew up in any more. I grew up in a place where Happy Days and the Fonz were big. Michael J Fox and Christopher Lloyd starred in Back to the Future. Dark Shadows, the Partridge Family, Sonny and Cher had their own show and Carol Burnet ruled. News came on the TV, radio and/or local papers. Now we have Twitter bought up and made private. People are either jumping onboard or jumping off. Even the owner is seeing that it’s not all fun and games and maybe it was just a tad more difficult than he had first assumed and not everyone agrees with him. Then there is the violence and war between Russia and the Ukraine. Added to the dismal news stories are the deaths of girls in Iran and the continued violence there. There is still a great deal of intolerance out there based on gender, race and religion. They found dead children buried in Residential School Grounds. Some people would rather do anything rather than wear a simple mask to protect each other…acting so put upon that they developed a convoy which resulted in the Emergency Act being used and an inquiry. In Nova Scotia, they had an inquiry into a mass casualty event. So many people traumatized by COVID and many having to self isolate due to medical conditions. People don’t want to know about the medically vulnerable, it seems. Of course, in the USA, there was the fallout from the January 6, 2021 riots. There seems to be a lot of coverage on the lack of honesty amongst politicians which seems pretty scary considering they’re responsible for the lives of their people.

If you want to find out more on some of these, I have discussed a number of them in my blog posts. Not all of them of course. There are just too many to keep up with in weekly podcasts. I likely missed lots of huge issues, but caught as many as I could think of off the top of my head. There is no lack of things to add to a listing, but this just gives a taste of the issues out in the world at large. After all, this is only a ten to fifteen minute blog post and podcast. I’m not realistically going to cover everything. The world also lost a lot of celebrities and it is hard to see these stars that were part of my childhood leave this mortal coil. Bob Saget, Meat Loaf, Gilbert Gottfried, Naomi Judd, Olivia Newton-John, Anne Hache, Leslie Jordan, Bob McGrath, Kirstie Alley, Stephen ‘tWitch’ Boss, John Aniston and Emilio Delgado just to name a few. Both Bob McGrath and Emilio Delgado spent their time on Sesame Street trying to encourage children to accept each other and others who are different from themselves. My apologies, I know there are other celebrities who passed away this year. Sympathies to all who have lost someone they loved or admired during the year. It’s never easy to lose someone. No one is ever prepared for the loss.

As Alex Morritt is credited with saying, "New year—a new chapter, new verse, or just the same old story? Ultimately we write it. The choice is ours.” I know that we can’t change the past; we have no choice but to move forward and grieve our losses. I have lost family during this year as well. I miss them. I also have no choice but to move forward. If you don’t move forward you get stuck in a cycle of guilt, blame and pain. To stay there forever is not healthy. Of course it is healthy and normal to grieve. The following article https://www.wikihow.com/Cope-With-Grief gives some suggestions. I’d be careful about the get a pet one. If you aren’t a pet person, getting a pet will only give you more work to do. If you are a pet person and can afford one, then that’s OK. Don’t just adopt a pet you’re going to give away later for the sake of trying it out. Pets are a big responsibility. Don’t worry about steps and reaching them all. I don’t know that I would suggest all steps in this article, but a lot of them do make sense. So, the first thing to move forward and continue working toward a healthy and happy New Year is to deal with grief. If it is complicated … if it is resulting in depression and getting in the way of moving forward and you are feeling suicidal, then reach out to a mental health therapist. You don’t have to keep feeling this way. If you belong to a church, you may be able to find a support group. It is possible to move forward. It’s a process and it’s not always perfect. It is also important to know that there are different reasons for someone to grieve. https://www.mayoclinic.org/patient-vi.... So, if you experienced something and you feel like you’re grieving, then it is possible. Any kind of loss can trigger grief.

Also, if you have experienced a rough year this year, it is important to know, “Your present circumstances don’t determine where you can go. They merely determine where you start.” —Nido Qubein This is what makes for the hope for change. Just because this year has been tough doesn’t mean you can't decide where you go from here. Do you want to change things? Do you want to change how you are feeling? It’s not impossible. First, find the resources that you need to move forward. Figure out how you want your life to be. What do you want your future to look like? This might be part of the reason for New Year’s Resolutions. I’m not saying that you need to make them. Just decide if you want your life to continue the way it is or do you want to change how it is. Once you decide how you want your life to look, you’ve got to decide where you want to make changes. The New Year seems to be a good excuse to do this. A New Year, a new you is the battle cry of the Resolution making group. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, the biggest step isn’t the making of the Resolution. That’s actually the easier part of this process. The hardest part is starting January 1, 2023 when you have to decide to take that first big step in making the change. That’s where it falls apart. It also falls apart because one makes a plan so incredibly complex or so unrealistic that only a miracle will accomplish it. If you want to make changes or resolutions, then it is most important to make it happen in small doable steps. I want to, for example read 100 books this year if you haven’t read more than an instruction manual in the past few years, is likely going to be difficult and you’ll be discouraged before you even start. So, make sure to select small steps that you will be able to do. If you want to do something, isn’t it easier to do it if you take small steps to begin with? Changing everything over night is both impossible, frustrating and you will feel like you failed. Set yourself up for success. If you want to change eating habits, then change one or two things at a time unless there is a health crisis that necessitates overnight change. Then find recipes that will allow you to maintain your desired result. Stick with it. Sure things aren’t going to work out over night. Sometimes you’re going to mess up the decided goal and maybe fall back into old habits. When you find yourself doing that, then go back to the goal and work on it.

Now that I mentioned making resolutions, I’m going to change the name of it because often resolutions fail. Why? They often fail because they are unrealistic and done to fulfill some kind of wish fantasy rather than actually wanting to change. The article https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/... is more like what one needs to do to make successful change. So, for some, it might be better to set goals rather than make resolutions. The article gives some steps and shows how you might be more likely to be successful meeting them. Remember, if you actually have a goal in mind and you want to get there, 99% of people will be willing to do the work. So, make your goal realistic and something you really want to do. Have some steps. You can find various free goal sheets online without looking to hard.

As CS Lewis is credited with saying, “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.” This is true of most things. While you are still on earth, there is still hope for change for the better. If we all made a goal of making this a better world for all of us, without provisos about race, religion, orientation, gender, can you imagine what kind of world we’d have? I can. Can you? It is my wish for the New Year that we all learn to be a little more tolerant and a lot less hating of people who are different. My biggest wish for the future is that we don’t hate people because of something that people can’t change. Some things people are born with. Some things people develop. As Nelson Mandela has been quoted as saying, “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.” If we can all realize this, we can realize the dream of a better year for all. I suspect that this blog post and podcast falls into the realm of Resolution. It’s nowhere near realistic. I have no way to implement it. It depends on others for it to be fulfilled and so far, our record for that isn’t generally successful. I keep hoping it won’t fail, but there is no clear attainable goal…but together we could make it happen.

As Oprah Winfrey is quoted as saying, “Cheers to a new year and another chance for us to get it right.” I can only hope that many take this quote to heart. We can’t keep up the way things are with all the violence against each other, hate greed and lies. We can’t continue to spread hate based on race, religion, orientation or gender. It’s just not profitable for anyone and costs us more and more every year. Whether you agree with me or not, I hope I made you think. Thanks for listening to my podcast and/or reading my blog post and thanks for your interest in A & J PEI Treasures! Keep watching because we’re always working on something. Thank you!

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