Start Over
You made it to the end of 2023! Take a moment to celebrate and appreciate yourself for your resilience, persistence, tenacity, and grit. For many of us, 2023 was a year of stretching, and you made it through, you also made it past. I am so proud of you!
If you have ever made use of any software without clicking Ctrl + S, only to experience a power outage after hours of work (with no auto-recovery feature installed), then you have experienced a specific kind of pain.
The pain of putting in effort and losing the intended dividends of said efforts. The painful thing about this kind of pain is the fact that after the initial pain of losing all your work, you will experience another type of pain that comes with starting from scratch, re-doing all you have already done afresh, and still having to fight to meet the deadline.
And if you are anything like me, you may find yourself juxtaposing your current timeline on the revised version against how much progress you would have made on the original draft if misfortune did not strike. Whenever faced with such an unfortunate circumstance this excerpt from Rudyard Kipling’s poem, If keeps me going:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
I don’t know what happened to you in 2023, but I do know this: a new year is a good time to start over. Take stock of the Ws and the Ls, it may be painful, but you must get over everything that did not go your way and just start over.
This time you are not starting as a novice, you are starting with a track record. you are starting wth experience. you are starting from a place of strength because you have seen everything that could go wrong, go wrong. You are starting with a broad idea of what not to do. Start again at your beginnings and start strong.
And when it seems too dificult to get yourself moving, I hope this scripture that has brought so much comfort and courage to me over the years will be able to carry you:
But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal. Phil 3:13b-14a (NIV).
Happy new year, welcome to 2024, this is our best year yet!
