Can we really change?

It's that time of the year when we make decisions like "starting next year, I'll smile more and listen more and practice my singing" or something like that. New Year's Eve comes and then it goes and then suddenly we're back in the normal life and we forget until New Year's Eve comes again.

Do we really have the potential to suddenly change our lives and make monumental decisions about it?

I am not saying that life cannot change. I am sure that whoever takes the time to look back ten years will realize that life did change. But it changed slowly, without you realizing it, with small decisions and small steps that added up and led you into a direction.

There are things you do suddenly: people stop smoking, they break up... sometimes they are forced by events to change. People die and that changes your life. You meet someone that suddenly takes up a lot of your time. But most of the times, the inner you stays the same, it just reacts to different circumstances.

I've never had much luck with New Year resolutions. I don't know many people whose lives changed as a result of a New Year resolution. And I think the first thing to consider when making a resolution like that is why we need to make that change and what it offers us. Chances that we will all become better all of a sudden just because we clicked our fingers and said that we will are rather slim. Being better is much more often the result of a long and slow process of improvement.

Life is rarely as glamorous as deciding to change and then doing it the next second. The silver lining is that knowing that, we might not get as discouraged as we are bound to when we realize that the simple fact that we changed the year number does not mean that we also changed.