Happy New Year!
As I write this week’s “Thoughts,” I am excited about this new day and what it represents.
You see, Caldwell’s fiscal year-end is August 31st. Thus, our wonderful accounting gnomes and elves magically snuck into our computers and turned all the dials back to “0”.
Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Thus, we are now 7.5 hours into Fiscal 2024 at Caldwell Partners, and I have done not one thing to positively impact the firm’s performance.
I guess I could have called a client when I got up at about 3:17 AM to answer the call of nature, but as much as clients like me – and believe me, clients like me A LOT – I don’t think anybody wants to hear from me at 3:17 AM, even if they are on the West Coast and it is only 0:17 AM.
I love New Year’s Day, and thanks to Caldwell’s founding father, Doug Caldwell, I get to celebrate New Year’s twice a year.
One of the positives about celebrating New Year’s Day on September 1st is that you don’t have to fix a big pot of black-eyed peas. I can celebrate by eating anything I want from a list of 3 foods that don’t contribute to hypoglycemia or clogged arteries (Would anyone like more Romaine?).
A new year, a new beginning.
I really liked something I read in the book The Earned Life, written by renowned executive coach Marshall Goldsmith, which touches on the topic of new beginnings. Goldsmith writes:
“When Gautama Buddha said, “Every breath I take is a new me,” he wasn’t speaking metaphorically. He meant it literally. Buddha was teaching that life is a progression of discrete moments of constant reincarnation from a previous you to a present you. At one moment, through your choices and actions, you may experience pleasure, happiness, sadness, or fear. But that specific emotion doesn’t linger. With each breath, it alters, eventually vanishing. It was experienced by a previous you. Whatever you hope will happen in your next breath, or the next day, or the next year will be experienced by a different you, the future you. The only iteration of you that matters is the present you who has just taken a breath. I start with the assumption that Buddha was right. That doesn’t mean you have to abandon your articles of spiritual faith or convert to Buddhism. I’m only asking you to consider Buddha’s insight as a new paradigm for thinking about your relationship to the passage of time and living an earned life. A core pillar of Buddhism is impermanence—the notion that the emotions, thoughts, and material possessions we hold now do not last. They can vanish in an instant—as brief as the time we need to take our next breath. We know this to be empirically true. Our discipline, motivation, our good humor—you name it—they do not last. They fall out of our grasp as suddenly as they appeared. ….Nevertheless, we have a hard time accepting impermanence as a rational way to understand our life, that the unity and singleness of our identity and character is an illusion. The Western paradigm, so deeply ingrained since childhood, is an ongoing argument against impermanence. Actually, it is a fairy tale, always with the same ending: And then they lived happily ever after. The Western paradigm is all about endeavoring for something better in the future and believing two things will result: (a) whatever our improvement, we remain essentially the same person we have been (only better), and (b) against all the evidence, this time it will last. It will be a permanent solution to whatever’s gnawing away at our spirit. That makes about as much sense as studying hard for an A in math and thinking it will make you an A student forever, or believing that your personality is fixed and you can never change, or that rising housing prices will never go down.”
So maybe I have it wrong.
I should be celebrating New Year’s Day every day.
Maybe I should change September 1, 2023, to “New Breath Day” (which is better than “Bad Breath Day”).
Every day is a gift, and every breath is a new life for which we should be grateful.
How is that for taking away some of the angst about work performance and achievement? In this new life, in this new breath, you get to learn from your screw-ups – but you don’t have to be your screw-ups. That was a past breath, a past life. That is not you, in the here and now.
And you get to just….be. You are not defined by the unknowns of the future, either. So don’t sit here suffering from the Great Western Disease of “I’ll be happy when…” – the thought that you will be happy when you get your golf handicap down to -10, or when the new car is yours, or when you finally get that promotion or recognition. Because all those things happen in a breath, in a fleeting moment, in a fleeting day, in a fleeting year, in a fleeting life, and like the last breath you took, they will soon be gone.
That is not to say one shouldn’t be happy about shooting a great golf score, or that you shouldn’t enjoy the new car, or take a bit of pride in the hard work that went into earning the promotion. But just remember that none of that really defines you or constitutes the essence of who you are.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Breath!
And Happy New You!
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