It’s a New Day – how do you want to live it?

Today is Naw Ruz, the New Year (or literally New Day) for Baha’is and Persians. For Baha’is the New Year comes after nineteen days (one Baha’i month) of fasting. The purpose of the fast is spiritual cleansing and renewal before the New Year. Except for a few years when I was pregnant or nursing, I have fasted every year since I became a Baha’i at the age of 20. Each year the fast is a unique experience – this year, it was one of those special fasts for me – probably because I had begun my “cleansing” months earlier as I dealt with personal challenges, both present and past. It was during the fast that the work I did to deal with these found a kind of resolution. But it wasn’t until last night, when I had yet another sleepless night that has become commonplace over the past few months (though the past week or so, my sleep had been much better), that I realized what I wanted to focus on in the coming year.

During this time of personal change, I have been trying to understand my automatic negative thoughts (ANTS) that caused me to have strong reactions to seemingly commonplace events. These are thoughts that I was not aware of, that had been with me for decades. Relatedly, I had also started trusting my heart and my intuition more. I have always had a very open and trusting heart but I often made decisions purely with logic and thinking; this was often effective but seeing things with my heart and intuition adds another important layer to my understanding of situations.

What’s more, I’ve been thinking a lot about friendship and those connections we feel to others. Have you ever started speaking to someone on a plane, at a lecture or elsewhere and found yourself connecting to that person, only to leave them when the plane landed or lecture ended, never to speak to them again? Or perhaps you got their contact info but never contacted them? I think it has happened to all of us. But what if that person was meant to be your friend, had something to teach you and/or you them and you missed that chance? I don’t want to miss those opportunities anymore and want to honour what my intuition tells me in those situations. So I have decided to make a more conscious effort to invest in new and existing friendships, to express the love I feel for others, and to accept friendship, in whatever form it may take, and offer it. May friendship and love cross your paths and may you follow where they lead you.