So yesterday was Christmas and I am already going on about New Years, well you have two choices, cope or ask why…

So the video may strike you as an odd choice for a Happy New Year; Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” though inspirational, to me at least, has never been the most “cheery” song; and this new version from Disturbed is downright haunting.

A friend I played the video for commented that “it is so angry”, all I could think of is why would it not be angry?  I tend to agree with this analysis I found online.  I have always viewed the song from the perspective of the chorus of voices in creation silenced to “fit-in” with the masses and all the songs that will never be heard.

Joy of the New Year

One of the issues of the New Year I have always been enchanted by, is the opportunity for a new beginning, a fresh start.  With the ending of one calendar year and the hanging of a new one we have a clean slate to create a new picture on, last years images and entities may still be floating around, but we are perched to change them.

One of the most common ways is the “New Year’s Resolution”, the often laughed about, pre-planned failures for the New Year.  Thought to have begun with the ancient Babylonians promising to repay debts and return borrowed items, simple and pragmatic ways of making space to create new beginnings.

New Years, new beginnings, new ideas, new plans, new horizons, new states of being all require an opening of someplace to put them, a removing of something no longer wanted or needed.

Not only do we have the perfect opportunity to bring in new and fresh “things” but the end of a year also gives the opportunity to dispose of that which has not worked for us in the past.

Thinking of the last, I have often wondered if it might make sense to spend the end of the year determining what to dispose of, the first of the New Year deciding what to do and then “Spring Cleaning” the old out and replace it with the new.  Strangely enough, this goes along with my last post as to the “shamanistic” approach to the Christmas Season.

In Wicca and similar traditions, the Winter Solstice is the rebirth of the Deity into the Underworld for the process of rejuvenation, to reenter the world at the Spring Equinox to re-establish life.  To these traditions New Years would be the Spring Equinox, so maybe the idea is not so “out there” afterall.

New Year’s Exercise

So we have a little less than a week before the old calendar goes into the trash and the new one gets hung on the wall.  What a perfect time to take a purview of the last year, what has been successful for you?  What has been troublesome?  If you could change anything about where the last year has left you, what would it be?

Assess where you want to take this next year, maybe you are wanting to create a new working situation for yourself, learn a new hobby, take a class, begin something new.  That’s what makes the New Year so special, it’s NEW!

Like a blank canvass to a painter, a block of granite for a sculptor or a blank page for the writer, you have an unsoiled space to begin with.

New Year, new perspective

To help make this easier for most of us, a perspective you might want to think about.  What about what you wish to dispose of?  That which you can remove immediately, feel free to, that which you cannot, take a new perspective and see it as a step to continue from.

I think one of the areas that we cause our own failing in life from most often is our dragging of the baggage of our past along with us.  The past is just that, past, it is how you arrived at where you are now, it is not the shaper of your future, to quote Glinda, the Good Witch of the North:

Glinda, “You have no power here…”

Often we use the past as our focus and basis of being in the now, and then drag it into the future when we really want to continue, not stay stagnant.  As we have looked at, can you think of a better time to release the past and embrace the future?

The Sounds of Silence and the New Year

So we are back to the “Sounds of Silence” and a  dark and angry interpretation of it at that.  The New Year gives you the opportunity to escape the silence, to be heard, seen and to experience.

People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared…

“Fools,” said I, “you do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.”

You have an ideal opportunity to begin afresh, take it so you do not spend another year swallowed by the “Sounds of Silence”.