New Year, New Me

With the New Year approaching, we are beginning to create our new year’s resolutions and promises to ourselves… Or are we? The New Year marks a time where you can ‘start over’, where everything stays the same but the only ‘restart’ that can happen is within us. It has become so widely accepted that any new year’s resolutions made will be abandoned by February, at best. Nowadays we create these resolutions with the aims of abandoning them shortly after, some don’t even bother now. It has become a sort of running New Year’s joke, reduced to memes on social media.

The phrase new year, new me is aimed at the fact that you are going to make a change. Of course you don’t magically change as soon as the clock strikes 12. You feel no different; it has to be a work in progress…that lasts the rest of your life. It would be better to have only one resolution that you would stick to and add more as the years progress. I don’t know where this notion of writing a list of resolution comes from.. it makes it almost impossible to keep them all, but maybe that’s why, so in the end we have to keep at least one to make ourselves feel better.

Are we setting ourselves up for failure? Are we doing this to give ourselves a temporary, fake feeling of taking action, of being better? At this rate it’s probably more effective to create resolutions in the middle of the year. By doing this, you can’t use all the parties between Christmas and New Year’s as an excuse. Either way if you’re not committed and determined, anything can be used as an excuse, or if you’ve really hit a low point, there won’t even be an excuse. We tend to abandon our resolutions because of the effort involved. For example if you wanted to go to the gym daily, that act of getting ready and going to the gym itself is a feat in itself. We then start to make excuses and say to ourselves ‘I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ll take today off as a treat for going 2 straight days in a row’. It seems to be embedded in us to not exert the effort even if we see the benefits. Apparently the temptation to slack off is too strong.

As always not everybody is like that. For those who have managed to keep their resolutions, I tip my hat off to you. It’s pretty incredible, the action of mind over body because after all that’s what it is. I will be the first to admit that I never keep my resolutions either, but then again I’ve only made a list once or twice. I gave up, knowing that I wouldn’t even attempt to start. Maybe this year there should be a change? I don’t know, it’s just so much easier not to do anything. Anyway, here are a few tips to keeping your resolutions:

• Be prepared – A big part of this is keeping your motivation up. You can buy the materials you need (if it’s the gym – workout clothes). You can post motivational quotes around your house. Find something that will inspire you throughout the process so you can look back at it when you feel like slacking off.

• Get help – Tell people your resolutions. This makes you have some sort of accountability. These people can also help you out.. or set you up to fail depends on who you surround yourself with!

• Set a finish time, a goal – By having a finishing date or a goal, there is something to aim for. You can then pace yourself and make a plan. It will also seem less of a daunting task.

• Have something realistic – This will also help with your motivation. You can increase you goal year on year or even month on month.

• Make one of your resolutions to keep your resolutions 😉

These are just a few random ideas off the top of my head, as I’ve said I not particularly experienced in this department. Hopefully they are of some use to you. Let me know how it goes!

Have a Happy New Year!

Till our next meeting,

Anon Online.

 

It’s the thought that counts!

As you’ve probably guessed, this post is about the phrase ‘it’s the thought that counts’. This phrase is so common nowadays where people have been using it as an excuse for a shitty/cheap present. When you hear someone say this, they probably don’t think much of it either, hence the need for this ‘excuse’ where the person just brushes it off. Now I’m not saying that everyone does this and a lot of times, the presents thought of as ‘crap’ to outsiders, is actually something very meaningful to the receiver. It used to be that people’s thoughtfulness and love for the other person would transcend the gift and so it would have been the thought that counted and not so much the present.

As we near Christmas we have to refocus ourselves to the actual meaning of Christmas and why it gives us so much joy. It’s the gathering of families and friends, the receiving of presents makes us feel appreciated, thought of and loved. Of course all the Christmas movies show this but they are so over watched that often, the meaning is overlooked. The giving of presents shows the person that they were remembered, they often signify something about the relationship between them. Therefore the price or appearance of the gift doesn’t matter as much.

The best example is when children give gifts to us; we are so happy even if the glitter gets everywhere, even if it’s falling apart and illegible. We are so warmed by this gesture because we know that children give with their hearts, without any ill will and took the time out in their busy schedules to create something for us. That’s when ‘it’s the thought that counts’ appropriately comes in. Don’t create a list of people to buy gifts for and let them become just that: names to be ticked off. Put some thought into it, you lazy bugger. Yes it may be stressful and require some thought, but at the end of the day it’s worth it to see them happy!

This is just a short reminder on Christmas and that it’s not all about what you receive materialistically. Even with my stuffy cold I am going to have a good Christmas amongst my loved ones. So enjoy the presence of your loved ones, the festivities and just as importantly, the food ;).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Till our next meeting,

Anon Online.

Dreams

Dreams have always fascinated me and for as young as I can remember I have always dreamt. You would be transported into a completely different world that seemed so real. My mother would also tell me about the dreams I told her when I was young. They would range from wonderful dreams where I am doing what I love the most, to nightmares where I am running for my life, to doing the most mundane things. I have constantly wondered whether there were any special meanings behind it and sometimes wondered if it was an indication of something to come.

I have had dreams of strangers, dreams with recurring themes such as running from something, stressful dreams. However I have never had certain popular dreams such as being naked in front of an audience of in school. I have had adventures on pirate ships (once) and a lot of spy-like experiences.

Here’s something funny, have you ever experienced this?: when you’re in bed and you’re on the brink of falling asleep and suddenly out of nowhere you have a dream/thought of yourself falling, it could be down some stairs or out of bed and you have some sort of real-life spasm throughout your body, looking like a total idiot and as a result you wake up. Good thing this only happens when you’re in private!

I have learnt a lot about my dreams, like having some sort of lucidity in dreams such as knowing I am in a dream but unable to do anything about it but it gives me some sort of reassurance, knowing that I am in a dream and that if I died, I would wake up (mostly through dreams when someone/thing is trying to kill me…). I have found that I’d only dream if I hadn’t done anything too mentally strenuous before sleeping otherwise I’d be up through the night thinking about things, philosophizing, thinking about different scenarios as I imagine we all do sometimes. I have also found that when in a nightmare and I realized that it was a dream I would tell myself to wake up several times and sometimes succeeded, waking up very disoriented and trying to keep my eyes open for long enough to become fully awake so not to slip back into that nightmarish land. I would realise that it was a dream before being able to let myself fall asleep and dream about something else. I have a lot of dreams involving food, even when I am being chased, sometimes I would find myself stopping by a shop or restaurant somewhere and having a bite to eat before I began running away again (clearly this stems from my love of food).

As a child I had recurring dreams/nightmares about being chased, whether it is by a pack of large dogs or people. It never had a definitive end as I was never caught but always in some sort of limbo of trying to run away, even though my legs were like lead and the chasers being close by. For some reason a lot of times I was able to fly but in the most useless way, I would flap my arms and be lifted higher and higher until I reached a certain point where no matter how hard I flapped, I was slowly getting closer to the ground again, so I would only evade my captors through height for a mere few seconds..(Turns out they could fly too and were much better than me). I think this kind of ‘flight’ came from video games, like the animation where it would kind of hover; you had to press the button faster in order to achieve gradual height. I know that the universal meaning of being chased means that you’re running from something or someone in real life, however I can’t think of what a young child could be running from.. I can link being chased by dogs to an incident as a child when I was chased by a dog down the road, but I wasn’t severely traumatized by it, it was an isolated incident and I have always loved dogs. However there must be some kind of subconscious effect since it is one of my youngest memories and I have been chased by dogs several times in my dreams.. I have also often found myself with the ability to scale high fences through people’s backyards when running away from something as one would jump over a ticket barrier or something.

As I grew older, I found that I could make more sense of my dreams and pinpoint where certain points came from in my real life. A lot comes from your own memory and I assume that strangers in your dreams are always someone you’ve seen maybe passing by on the street. Also incidents that have involved strong emotions have a big possibility of appearing in some form in your dreams. The more mundane dreams often stem from things happening in real life being repeated in your dreams with slight variations. They can also come from your own conscious thoughts or fantasies. Later on, I began to have fewer nightmares and more pleasant or mundane dreams, a lot of times I would look forward to going to bed to see what dreamland had in store for me. Recently I have had dreams of doing what I love to do most – swimming or anything water related. It could be something as simple as diving underwater in a pool for some time and I’d wake up a happy bunny.

Tell me what you think!

Till our next meeting,

Anon Online.

Anything and Everything

This is an outlet for me to write about as the title suggests – anything and everything. It is just for my own entertainment and if you want, yours as well. It serves as something to get my thoughts in order and a hobby and for some reason I’m deciding to post it online; however there are certain disclosures I have to make:

• There will be no format or schedule I am just writing these things in order to share my thoughts, if you’re interested. Sometimes there may be things that don’t make any sense at all.. just ignore me.

• I am aware that I am not a great writer, nor do I claim to be so I will be the first to say that there will be several mistakes!

• I may write informally or quite formally, just depending on what comes to mind. Profanity may also be involved.

• There may be short entries of random thoughts and there will be some that seem like an in-depth academic essay.

All thoughts and opinions are my own although they may be influenced by unseen forces…

One thing to look forward to, is that you’ll never know what might come next. It will come as a surprise to the both of us. If you’re bored or in a pensive mood, this is a good place to look!!

Till our next meeting,

Anon Online.