Touched by an Angel: How to make the new year 'new'

"For last year's words belong to last year's language. Next year's words await another voice." - T S Eliot

It is 2021 and already a week into those "New Year resolutions".

I have been thinking about how I might make 2021 a new year for me. For most of my life I have loved my Mum and Dad, partners, my children, my grandchildren, my birth parents and their families, and those children who joined our family through foster care, the wonderful extended family and friends around me. I loved them the best I could and often I have put other people first.

More and more I understand that I need to start loving myself. I need to be better able to give and take compliments because they enhance both the giver and the receiver. My Angels remind me that the receiver should never turn a compliment down, that we should simply say "thank you".

Now I am older, I realise that I have been a bit rude telling older people I have heard their story before. Instead I should let them walk down memory lane and relive their past. I find myself reminiscing too.

I'm learning not to correct people even if I know they are wrong. I hear my Angels giggle and say, "The onus of making everyone perfect is not mine and that peace is more precious than perfection."

William Shakespeare once said, "It is not in the stars to hold our destiny, but in ourselves."

With this in mind in this new year I am going to live each day as if it might be my last, because we never know, it might be. I will choose to be happy.

My friends, remember that happiness is our own choice, and we can be happy anytime, no matter what goes on around us. Being happy is our responsibility and we owe it to ourselves.

Arohanui. Shirley-Joy