The Myth of January First and New Year resolutions
As we stand on the threshold of another calendar year, I want to talk about something that’s been on my mind. Something about the weight we place on this arbitrary line between December 31st and January 1st, and how it might actually be working against us.
There’s this collective breath we all seem to hold at the end of December. We tell ourselves: This year will be different. This year I’ll finally change. We load up our resolutions like pack mules preparing for a journey, convinced that the stroke of midnight will somehow transform us into the people we’ve been trying to become all along.
But here’s what I’ve learned: You are already becoming.
Every single day, you are in the process of transformation. The spiritual energy you seek, the growth you’re reaching for, the person you want to become—none of these are locked behind the door of a new calendar year. They’re available to you right now. They were available to you in March, in July, in October. They’ll be available to you on January 17th when the New Year’s enthusiasm has worn off and you’re just trying to make it through another Wednesday.
The Gregorian calendar is a useful tool for organizing our lives, but it’s also completely arbitrary. There’s nothing magical about January 1st except the meaning we’ve collectively agreed to assign it. And while I’m all for using meaningful moments as catalysts for change, I worry about what happens when we concentrate all our hope for transformation into a single date.
Because here’s what often follows:
We set ambitious goals fueled by the promise of a “fresh start.”
We work hard for a few weeks.
hen life gets complicated, we stumble, we miss a day or a week, and suddenly that fresh start feels tainted. The magic is gone. We tell ourselves we’ll try again next January, and we spend the next eleven months carrying the weight of that perceived failure.
This is where the real damage happens.
When we tie our capacity for growth to the calendar, we internalize a harmful belief: that transformation is something that happens to us at designated times, rather than something we cultivate continuously through daily practice and gentle persistence.
The truth is far more liberating and far more demanding. Real change doesn’t happen because the Earth completed another orbit around the sun. It happens because you chose—today, and then again tomorrow, and then again the day after that—to show up for yourself. To practice self-awareness when it’s uncomfortable. To engage in self-reflection when you’d rather scroll. To offer yourself self-acceptance when you inevitably stumble.
This is the greater work: building a life of disciplined practice that doesn’t depend on external markers to give it meaning or momentum.
I’m not suggesting you abandon goal-setting or that you can’t use the New Year as a moment of reflection. What I am suggesting is that you release yourself from the tyranny of calendar-based transformation. You don’t need permission from January 1st to begin again. You can begin again on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of February. You can begin again after lunch. You can begin again right now.
The spiritual growth you’re seeking isn’t waiting for you in 2025. It’s walking alongside you, available in every moment you choose to turn toward it. Your practice doesn’t need a fresh start—it needs your consistent, compassionate attention, day after day, regardless of what the calendar says.
So as we move into this new year, I invite you to hold your resolutions lightly. Set your intentions, yes, but don’t hang all your hope on a single day’s symbolic power. Instead, commit to the unglamorous, profound work of showing up for yourself continuously. Of being gentle with your humanity. Of understanding that becoming is not a destination you reach on January 1st or any other date—it’s the ongoing, sacred work of being alive.
You are not broken and in need of fixing when the clock strikes midnight. You are already whole, already worthy, already in the process of becoming. The only question is: will you meet yourself where you are, with kindness and discipline, today and every day after?
Here’s to a year of continuous becoming, starting right now.
