Happy New Year 2017!

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the threshold of a brand new year! As we live the last day of 2016, hopefully we are done with the introspection and having identified the needed course-corrections, we look forward to stepping into the new orbit, all fresh and renewed. The new calendar year offers us yet another 12-month clean slate for working towards our personal goals – more exercise, more sleep, more family time, more reading, less sugar, less social media…

It’s good to be ambitious about various aspects of our life – to want to better ourselves – a better you in 2017 is a good resolution. Even so, we end up setting ourselves for failure in the pursuit of perfection, which is, as we all know, a fool’s paradise. Yes, we should work towards better health and try to stop looking into our phones as much as we do, but if we inculcate these constructive preferences as part of a rigorous journey towards a better version of ourselves, we will, in all probability, fail. Inflexible regimes brimming with self-denial and sacrifice are never good platforms for any positive change, and especially not for New Year’s resolutions.

Though there is no manual providing us with the masterplan which ensures a better and happier you in the New Year, we do stumble upon the sporadic pieces to the puzzle or get hit by the occasional epiphany, which helps us along our way. One of these, in my personal opinion, the best so far, is ‘Don’t take things personally’. Really. Don’t! What other people do or think or say about you is NOT about you, it’s about them. As the writer-philosopher Ruiz puts it, “You eat all of their emotional garbage, and now it becomes your emotional garbage.”

Another gem that holds you in good stead is simple but extremely effective, ‘Don’t assume’. An assumption is a ruminated thought that gets accepted as reality, without any proof to it. Today, we find ourselves living in a community where people seem to be up in arms against each other, in words and deeds, based on both these fixations – assumptions and taking things personally. How different would our communications and outlooks become if that weren’t the case! And lace that with grace and compassion, and we would surely be happier individuals and a happier community. What better way to start 2017 than by embracing these simple resolutions?

Here’s bidding adieu to 2016 and a hearty welcome to 2017! May the new orbit bring in every happiness, success and prosperity to each one of us and to our precious community, and may our spirit of Parsipanu reign in our hearts!

Team Parsi Times wishes all our readers a Happy New Year!

-Anahita