Today is a good day to declare a New Beginning.

I should know, because I have a certain degree of experience in the matter. I have been declaring New Beginnings and Fresh Starts for decades, now. It's easy – you have to choose a nice symbolic date (today, July 1st, is perfect, because it's halfway through the year), make a token gesture like tearing off all the pages of your journal, spring cleaning or shaving your head, declare that From Now On Things Are Going To Change, and then — this is the vital step — really hope that something does indeed change. There you go, Bob's your uncle, New Beginning achieved. I've been doing this for so many years now that I could Start Anew blindfolded.

And yet, it does feel as if something has indeed changed. Not today, specifically; not yesterday either, nor last weekend, though that's when I moved to my new apartment. Not even in late February, when my almost-seven-year-relationship ended. Change seldom happens on a specific day. Change creeps on you. In this petty pace, from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time and all that. Before a relationship ends, a relationship deteriorates. Before one moves to a new country, one starts wondering what they are doing in the old one. Before one quits smoking, one starts really wishing he could. The moment of decision is often, in fact, only the realisation that the decision has already been taken. But I digress.

This New Beginning is not just merely a change of address. It's a whole constellation of things that I want to change. Have daily walks. Eat healthy. Read more. Write more. Travel. Learn more languages. Meditate. And the targets I have set for myself (walk: 10,000 steps a day; read: 60 books in 2021; meditate: at least 20 minutes before bed), make it easy for me to fail, if not hitting an arbitrary target is failure. But as I said – the real change has already happened. I may not read sixty books this year, but I have already read much more than I have last year. I do not always meditate twenty minutes a day, but I do meditate. And while I walked less than 2,000 steps today, I have never been so active as I have been lately.

So, I am going to do away with the whole idea of proclaiming a New Beginning. I can only live one life, and there's no restarting it. Whatever I do from now on, it will be less of a fresh start than a course correction. However, I know that, from today, I can work to become the person I want to be, and strive to change the things that I don't like about myself. How do I know that I can do that? Well, that's what I have been doing all along.