As the new year dawns upon us
We seek your forgiveness for the sins of the past.

May our one resolution for this coming year
Be to walk with you from the first day to the last.

Fill each day with a new awareness of your presence
And make us a blessing to those around us.

Joyce Blakney Duerr

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

Zora Neale Hurston

Now let us welcome the New Year, full of things that have never been.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

One year ends, another begins.  The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s invocation to us to be open to receiving the New Year’s bountiful blessings challenges me to look deep within – not only in anticipation of all the wonderful new things that have never been before, but in wistfulness for the simple abundance overlooked.  Splendid gifts overlooked because they were hiding beneath Life’s plain brown paper wrappers.

Before Simple Abundance, I obsessed on the perfection of my days rather than on their lush possibility.  Consequently, I didn’t welcome the New Year with as much joy and good cheer as I do now.  Instead, I greeted January with steely will, dogged determination, and a list of resolutions so demanding and daunting I was doomed to fail from the start.  “This year I’ll earn a hundred thousand dollars, write a bestseller, study sculpture, stop smoking, lose thirty pounds, learn to lambada, become fluent in French, build a barn, raise rare sheep, conquer clutter, redecorate the kitchen, hike the Himalayas, and master the stock market,” I used to promise myself.

Was I out of my mind?  In a word: yes.  naturally, by the end of the first week of January I was emotionally exhausted by my unrealistic expectations.  And so, year after year, no matter how hare I tried, my impossible ambitions made me feel like a complete failure, privately and publicly.  Who could live up to that woman’s hallucinations, and who’d want to anyway?

One New Year’s Eve, as I reviewed a decade’s worth of personal diaries recording a litany of unfulfilled longings, I realized that I had woven a subtle but strong pattern of self-defeating behavior into my life.  By always taking on too much at once – and yearning for instant transformation – I was unconsciously engaging in self-sabotage.  What’s more, I realized that my unrealistic annual resolutions were designed less to improve the quality of my life than to lift me out of the banality of my “ordinary” existence as a wife, mother, and journeyman writer.

Truth or dare:  How many times have you prayed for a life “less ordinary” than the one you’re living?  If you’re being honest, you’ll say, “Often.”  Can I challenge you to a dare?  Today, stop praying for anything other than the life you have!  Join me as we tear up that list of resolutions.  You don’t need them anymore.  All you have is all you need.  But more than that, all you have is all you could possibly want.  If you don’t believe it, stick close by me this year and I’ll prove it.

So before we begin the year, with a sense of adventure, give thanks for your most “ordinary” life.  This is how the miracle begins, as we embark with a sense of adventure seeking the splendid in the simple gift of the everyday.

Sarah Ban Breathnach
Excerpted From Romancing the Ordinary – A Year of Simple Splendor

There is something so splendid, so abundant about Life’s “second chances” that arrive each morning.  Perhaps it’s because second chances (or third, fourth, and fifth!) are the golden opportunities we thought too good to be true the first time around.  Now we know better.

Let your New Year begin with a ritual of reverence and reconnection I call Tabula Rasa – a clean slate – which is an evening dedicated to dreaming about the weeks and months to come and how you’d like to savor them.  Revel in them.
Appreciate them.  A sweet New Year’s ritual is to be “at home” to the Future.  Curl up in your favorite chair, listen to some soothing music, sip something festive and bubbly, and slowly light twelve votive candles – one for each new month.  As you light the first candle, ask the month of January, are there any old desires you need to relinquish in order to move on?  Ask February, what new-to-you “ordinary” ritual can you begin integrating into your daily round or week that will be self-nurturing?  Perhaps it’s leave your desk-top clear of clutter at the end of each day, but it could just as well be take a nap on Sunday.  Ask March, what new dream is seeding itself in your imagination?  Be fanciful, curious with your questions.  When you ask each month its question, whatever answer pops up, be it whimsical or practical, act upon the suggestion and notice how you feel later.  Keep a record of your experiment in a journal.

Pretend you’ve never been given the gift of a new year before.  Dame Good Fortune has swept in with her arms full of
presents just for you.  In a little book that I cherish, Ceremonials of Common Days, written by Abbie Graham in 1928, she describes her annual visit this way: “I open the door.  The gorgeous guest from afar sweeps in.  In her hands are her gifts – the gift of hours and farseeing moments, the gift of mornings and evenings, the gift of spring and summer, the gift of autumn and winter. She must have searched the heavens for boons so rare.”

Sarah Ban Breathnach
Excerpted from Romancing the Ordinary – A Year of Simple Splendor