Release Date: Friday, December 21, 2007

Celebrate starting over

Whether you have a gleeful Merry Christmas or a scornful Hum Bug on your lips, your holidays probably look a lot like your other days! We don't turn into Jesus or Scrooge or Santa Claus overnight — except in movies.

If you enjoy the holidays, you probably enjoy your life...and if you bemoan the holidays, well, you can do something to make your life happier. And yes, the new year is a perfect time to do that.

Start today, though. And if you mess up, start again before tomorrow. The glory of starting over is starting over. You get to try again until you get it just right; you get to learn until you know it all. Then, I suppose you get to die happy or live in nirvana or be transported into the heavens.

Much of life is about starting over. It's about falling down and learning from it, getting up and starting again. And if that doesn't sound like fun to you, just watch a little baby do it. Better yet, let the baby wrap his little fingers around yours and help him learn to walk.

Look into his twinkling eyes and see if you don't get a new perspective on resilience — joy in the stumbling and peace in the falling. There might be some cries and screams, but they won't keep him down. With a little coaxing, I bet you can turn the cries into smiles and laughter, and find yourself gleeful.

Why not encourage yourself? Believe in yourself? Show kindness and understanding to yourself?

If you don't do that, chances are you don't feel like showing other adults kindness, either. But that's just because you lost sight of the baby, or the goodness, in you and in them. The hope is still in there; the joy and the peace are still in there.

Yes, you have grown-up problems, and you've taken some tough falls. Like me, you've probably curled up and sobbed what felt like hopeless sobs. And maybe you've filed away enough lousy memories to make any person angry and bitter — any person who wanted to be, that is.

After you've aired all of your grievances, the hard knocks and the heartaches, with all the should-haves and if-onlys, ask yourself this question: Do you want to be happy anyway?

All you really have is today. You can't go back and do yesterday differently. You can learn from it, though, enough to do today differently.

You can start again. You can celebrate today...and tomorrow and the day after. You can celebrate every day. And then, when the holidays come around, you'll already be in celebration mode.

In fact, what we do at our house is just leave the tree up all year. There's nothing to put up and nothing to take down. And the little white lights feel like magic to me.

Take whatever feels like magic to you and give it a prominent place. Let it shine. Let it make you laugh and run and jump and fall down and start over again, like a child.

You don't really have to do something special to celebrate the holidays if you do something special to celebrate today, every day. You can come up with a bunch of reasons — or excuses — not to. List them all, every last one of them.

Then ask yourself this question: Do you want to live anyway?

If you do, start today. You don't really have to do something special. You just have to realize that life itself is awesome. Do whatever comes naturally. And stop doing whatever doesn't come naturally. Amazing how that sounds like a novel idea!

Keep starting over until it feels like your everyday life.