Starting afresh this New Year! Time to let go the past!

                              
Hi Friends! Happy New Year! 

I hope that the year started great for all of you. For me, yes it did! I had a great time in India with my family and friends and now I am back in Hong Kong, just in time to celebrate the Chinese New Year! 

And as the first month of the new year is coming to an end, I tried to retrospect this morning if anything had happened worth noting down here. If I had discovered some pearls of wisdom to share with you all. And I realized that I had in fact understood a very important point. 

To tell you this point, I will start with a short story which I had read in the Speaking Tree section of The Times of India newspaper. The story goes like this.  

A wise man once told a joke to a group of people. Everyone was amused and laughed a lot and appreciated the humour. After some time, he narrated this joke again. This time, people were slightly less amused and just smiled. He repeated the joke the third time and nobody gave a reaction. When he tried telling the same joke again for the fourth time, people got irritated. Someone shouted at the wise man asking why was he repeating the same joke again and again. The man replied, "If repeating a joke ceases to amuse after a few times, then how do we carry on with repeated remembrance of painful stories?"

As per my last post, when I was noting my experiences of the last year and the dreams and challenges for the coming year, I was reminded of some of the sad memories and unhappy incidents from my past. I realized that I had been carrying them with me since many years and they had only accumulated and become a huge emotional baggage affecting my present and future. This baggage had only hurt me and given me more pain with time.

Many of us have been carrying the weight of these unnecessary painful memories since ages. A lengthy warm discussion with my mum made me see that it was time to let go, time to be free from this baggage. Time to be free from fear, anger, hurt, resentment, guilt and all kinds of negative emotions from the past. 

Hence as the Chinese celebrate their New Year with fireworks today, and the world rejoices with them, let us all decide to leave something behind in 2011 and start the journey of 2012 afresh! Lets free the diaries of our mind and heart and fill them with fresh happy chapters. You might say that this is not easy. I agree. I wish that the human genius would invent some device to retain only selective memories in our brain. However until that happened, we would need to do it manually. And this how I did it:

1. Free from Anger - Try to make yourself free from all the anger, resentment, or hatred that you might have carried for many different people since childhood. You are only doing a favour to yourself by letting go of these feelings towards them. Forgive them. I am not asking you to make them your best friends. But rise to a level where it no longer affects you. The moment is over. Now it is time to move on. 

2. Free from Guilt - Quite often we life we blame ourselves for things which happened in our lives or in the lives of our loved ones. However, don't forget that we do not have control over everything. So free yourself from guilt. If you know you made a mistake, try to redeem it. But do not spoil what you can do today or tomorrow because of one wrong thing you did yesterday. 

3. Free from regret - Time machines only existed in fiction and hence there is no way we are going to be able to go back and change our decisions, our situations, our mistakes. Hence, believe that everything happened for a reason and learn from them. Live in the moments of present and think of the dreams of future. Try not to regret the past. 

4. Believe in yourself - Believe in yourself and believe in the beauty of your present and future. Just because something happened once in the past or someone told you something, it does not become a reality. Trust yourself.

I had read when I was a kid, that every story has two parts. A beginning and an end. If you didn't like the beginning you could give it a beautiful end. So don't remain stuck on the beginnings which didn't start well. 

I have decided to give some fresh endings in the year 2012. I have decided to forget and to forgive. All the best to you too!

Kung Hei Fat Choy