New Year, New You - Battle of Wills?

At the beginning of a New Year, how many times do you come across the 'New Year, New You' mantra? How often do you think about it and hope that the new year will be a better one?  You may kick off to a great start and as the year progresses, the old battle of wills creep in again.

Sometimes we think to ourselves, 'why bother?' or 'I told you so', you tried a different approach in previous years and it didn't work then so why should it work now? Those old thoughts return like a boomerang, either smacking us in the face or creeping up quietly on us like a cat about to leap on its prey.

It was only mid January and my 'New Year, New You' optimism had already waned.  It all started after having set up a temporary home in our office in Singapore for four weeks over the Christmas period because we needed to renew our passports before returning to Bali. Initially, it was quite a novelty being right in the heart of Singapore's Chinatown.  It felt good to be a part of the Asian community.   That was until the two quiet lacquer ware and Chinese artefact shops on the ground floor transformed into gruesome, ghetto blasting Chinese New Year shops, flogging paper decorations, that screamed bright red, accompanied by booming Chinese music and an annoying man on a loud speaker talking different Chinese dialects to entice customers to his shop.

At first, I was quite excited to be in the thick of it all. All the noise and colour is used to ward off evil spirits, but as the music seemed to get louder and last from morning until midnight, the noise started to grate on me. My battle of wills were in a tug of war, the one fast becoming an evil spirit and wanting to put my hands around the Chinese man's neck and the other reminding me 'while in Rome do what the romans do' and to fully embrace this wonderful experience. The battle went on in my head until my family and I escaped to Bali.

I was so looking forward to a peaceful night's sleep when I returned but this was not to be.  With the run up to Galungan which also symbolises the victory of virtue upon evil, I was welcomed back with a noisy din of music late into the night which hit my head like a hang over. Yet another test of wills and whichever one I decided to focus on would win, so I choose to be positive by acknowledging that it was much better than the Chinese music.

My first week back in Bali felt like another test of wills, ranging from my girls suffering fevers so they couldn't go to school after a 5 week break, my laptop dying on me, wondering why I ever bothered to exercise when it was so hard going back, enduring seven long power cuts in just over a week, and most devastating of all, my fun Indonesian aerobics instructor's classes were replaced by some serious, high impact SAS training routine. I was annoyed, negative and felt like everything was going wrong and at the same time there was my other will reminding me to be positively optimistic that things would definitely get better.

And so they did. My girls returned to school, my husband retrieved all my work from my broken down laptop, replaced by a nice new one and  after a mini women's revolution, spearheaded by a French female version of Napoleon, our wonderfully popular aerobics instructor was duly returned! The power cuts continue........ My staff quite rightly informed me, "it's too windy because of the rainy season and lots of trees are falling down." 

New year, new you?  Remember to let the right will be the stronger force:-

"Strength does not come from physical capacity.  It comes from an indomitable will."
Mahatma Ghandi

Make it a will and not a wish.

"Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes."
Chinese Proverb

Let your best will win.


Janet