It’s always so interesting how quickly a year seems to go by. Here it is, the day after my 34th birthday and only days away from 2015 and as is often the case for most of us, I’m looking back on the past year and looking forward to the next. This year has been one of the most challenging in my life. If I weren’t already depressed one could argue that this year gave me several reasons to be. I resigned from the company I’d worked at for over a decade, sold my home, moved to a new town, changed careers, lost my grandmother. There are so many reasons to feel downtrodden and less than optimistic going into the New Year, but I’m not. The world may not always seem fair, but that’s the thing about life, you pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start all over again.

So maybe those last few words were lyrics from a song but as so much of life is, they are quite poetic. We go day by day in the drudgery of life sometimes feeling like we just don’t have the strength or the encouragement we need to persevere. What I’ve realized over this difficult year is that even in the darkest periods there are always some light. Whether it’s kind words of comfort even kind deeds, sometimes we get so bogged down by life’s difficulties that we don’t always see life’s blessings.

I don’t know what next year brings, none of us do. What I do know is that having a more optimistic outlook can affect how it is I embrace what lies in store. When it comes to New Years resolutions I know that we make them, we break them. What’s important is that we are motivated to make the changes we feel are necessary for our own personal growth. No matter what time of year it is, it’s always a good time to take the baby steps you need to make the lasting changes you desire in your life.

The start of a New Year often provides us with a renewed sense of excitement and motivation. However, don’t allow the inevitable missteps or temporary setbacks to mire your positive focus. That is to say, life is life and even if you fail or miss the mark on your first, second or third tries, it doesn’t mean that you give up. It means that you keep going until you succeed or until your path takes you in a different direction. One of the big things I learned this year is that you’re never too old to discover something new about yourself. It is now a more welcomed surprise when I make these new revelations about myself. We busily hurry through life and that sometimes causes us to miss hearing our inner voice. When that voice becomes more audible it can stop us in our tracks. This year was definitely a year of pause, a year of reflection and a year of discovery.

Life has a way of changing you, and if we let it, it does so for the better. No matter how hard things get and how difficult it can sometimes be to find it, there is always a silver lining. So as you welcome in 2015 take with you what you learned this year and continue to grow. Leave behind the negativity of the past and embrace what the New Year has in store for you. Who knows, you may be pleasantly surprised.

This article appeared on page 5A in the 12/24/14 issue of The Union-Recorder.