A new year beckons us! What will 2015 hold in store for you and your family? What are you looking forward to or maybe even dreading? What did you learn from this last year?
The start of a new year gives a natural opportunity to appraise how the last year has gone and make preparations for the months that lie ahead.
Søren Kierkegaard has a helpful quote that says, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward.”
Indeed those who do not learn from the past are invariably doomed to repeat the same mistakes or find themselves getting stuck in their relationships or other areas of their life. It is so easy to reach a lid to your potential. As someone has said, there is a world of difference between 30 years of experience and 1 year of experience repeated 30 times!
There is also a real danger of continually living in the past and what might have been. The so called ‘if only ____’ syndrome (you fill in the blank). What I think is much more helpful is the U.S. Army evaluation system:
I am grateful to Michael Hyatt for the following questions to appraise 2014 and look ahead to 2015. He has a very helpful programme called Your Best Year Ever which you can access here.
I will also share my answers with you to help you think through your thoughts about 2014. I would strongly encourage you to also write down your own answers and not just keep them in your head. As we write, our thoughts begin to disentangle themselves and bring clarity in a way that is otherwise just not possible.
As I share the questions below I have added some of my own reflections to help you think through your own experiences. If you want more clarification from me feel free to ask in the comments section below. My hope for you as I indulge myself in this way publicly is that you will be prompted to have insights that will put you in a stronger positions for whatever this new year has in store for you.
So here goes!
1. If the last year of your life were a movie what genre would it be?
Would it, for example, be an adventure, a comedy of errors, a romance or a suspense mystery?
For me it was a thriller with a lot of surprise and tension.
Going through my daily journal form this last year, I noticed that as a family we started 2014 watching on DVD the funeral service of a dear friend Caroline Lonas who had died in the United States in 2013. In many ways that did set the tone for the rest of the year. The biggest event was the sudden unexpected death of my close friend Bunty on 17 March. There were also 3 other unexpected funerals that I attended. However, on the positive side there were unexpected trips to India, France and the United States with family and on my own that I did not anticipate at the start of the year! They were a complete surprise and a wonderful way to renew and build friendships.
Dr Sunil Raheja
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