We sat lazily at our home on the last day of 2023. Our children are all in their homes, safe and sound. We were thankful and preparing to go to mass in the New Year. A lot of our friends and family were preparing to attend cross-over service. The issue of who was going to cross over to 2024 in church and who was not going to was all over the place.
Traditionally, as a family, we attend the New Year Mass but have different strokes for different folks. It does not matter where you worship or when on New year’s day if you steal, you are still as wicked as hell, you lie and you are still a Gossip then your crossover is fake and you really have not begun the new year or the resolution.
But I digress. Recall our lazy outlook in our home on new year’s eve and our plan to attend an early morning New Year mass was still on. But we then decided to join an old family friend for a new years eve dinner. We had accepted their invitation. As we munched through a delicious dinner, our host’s wife took a phone call and bedlam was let loose. A scream, exclamation, and many sighs and sad comments. Then she broke the news publicly away from the phone.
This is why a new year is a brand new start for everyone who has crossed it.
A mutual friend’s staff battling an ailment had passed. Gut wrenching! And so it was that this man who is a father and a husband lost the position to wish anyone “Happy New Year” as he did not make it into the new year. There are many people in his position, men, women, and children, including persons who were in church for the cross over service and those preparing for the cross-over service who did not make it into the new year.
My younger sister, the delectable Ms Josephine Amodu, died on New Year’s Day as I prepared to take Jollof rice, which she had requested for the hospital. I remember it like yesterday. These things, life and death, are out of our hands. There is no New years day that Josephine is not remembered. She was a truly generous person, and so she is remembered all the time and her daughter Bata, our gift from God.
It is a wonderful time to be alive, to have crossed over into 2024, and its grace, and we ought to be thankful for it.
This is why a new year is a brand new start for everyone who has crossed. Everyone must learn that being alive in a new year is a gift, which is why we must all re- brand and rejig as we enter a new year. Some people call it a new year resolution but we all know that for a lot of people, the end of January is often the end of the resolution.
So today, as 2024 unfolds like a blossoming flower, bright, beautiful, and beckoning, this is the best time to look back, change stuff, and become a better person. This is where I shall bring forward a few of the things that I believe everyone, both old and young, should attempt to work on for a brand new year:
1) Promise yourself to look after your health. Stop eating or drinking what does not bring you a health value.
2) Talk to a close friend or family member if you think your mental health is not optimum.
3) Talk is cheap. Other than point 2, promise yourself that your life, move, success, and career moments are not for public knowledge. Not everyone wishes you well.
4) Promise God and yourself that you would be kinder and gentler with people. A fight and aggression is not necessarily the answer to the world’s problems.
5) Promise yourself that you will set boundaries. For women, don’t accept being spoken to anyhow or being touched inappropriately. Set boundaries for men. Hold your side. No one should walk all over you. For all of these should be your 2024 rules.
6) Don’t allow toxic people into your space; people who only radiate negatives. Advise yourself to hang around people with positive energy. If it’s toxic, it can damage your mental health. Walk away. It does not matter if it’s family or a cute girl or boy. Walk away. Clear your head.
7) Time to learn a new skill and commit to it!
8) Save some money; it does not matter if it’s 200 naira a day. It adds up. Invest. Buy Ankara. Sell it. Make some money. Build multiple streams of income.
9) Get some education if you can. It’s an investment.
10) Honour your father and your mother so your days would be long.
11) Spend more time with your family. Get to know them.
12) Promise God you would not go to him only when you are in trouble. Make a faith habit. Useful for centering you.
13) Be charitable; it always comes back.
14) Be happy. No one can give you happiness. You have to give yourself. Then spread it.
15) Give out what you don’t need. There are people who need it.
16) Look after yourself. You have only one life.
Happy 2024. May the new year be good to you, Amen.
