New Year’s Eve: tick-tock, tick-tock the clock strikes twelve and there is an eruption of greetings and hugs and kisses as the new year is welcomed in. The flurry of activity slowly dies down and then it’s time to send out the requisite greetings to the virtual world. I wait to feel any different but what with the long day and the longer night, all I feel is tired and I switch off my questioning mind and take myself off to bed to catch some sleep handing over the ‘stay-awake’ duty to the awakening birds.

This year my New Year’s greeting was about making a difference and doing more things.  In the normal course of life we are so used to routine that we don’t really try to make any changes, even when we want to. One week on into 2017 and most people would have fallen back into their routine…whilst news year’s is a great time to remind yourself of the changes you want to make in your life, unless you make a commitment and practice your changes every day, every hour, they will fall to ashes like most new year resolutions usually do and life takes over.

The trouble with making changes is that the results are not instant and living in the ‘instant-messaging, half-hour delivery, quick service’ world that we live in, we have become used to not waiting for things and hence we lose interest and momentum and fall back into our safety net.

However, in a statitic I had read, a person wastes 62 minutes each day of their life waiting for something – waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the right moment, waiting in traffic, waiting for the bus/train, waiting for a reply, waiting for your turn in a queue …but because this is so subtly intertwined into our day we don’t even realise it. If we become more aware of our time and manage to turn even half that time to do something that we have wanted to, will we not be able to make the changes that we dream about but have never managed to implement?