Well, here we are again. Another year is gone and we're faced with the timeless New Year's tradition of easily forgotten and never kept resolutions. I always think very carefully about what I should do in the new year, but it rarely sticks. But this year as I was standing on the sidewalk in front of a hotel in Shanghai, I thought about how negative my life currently is. I also thought about how angry I always am. My grandfather always says, "you're affected by the water you swim in." And over the last few months, I've been swimming in a murky water filled with negativity and complaining and anger.
So I decided to look at where all this anger and frustration was coming from. First, the family I live with reeks of negativity. There's always yelling and hitting and childish behavior that no one cares to address. I spend most of my time in this loud angry apartment and when I leave, it doesn't get much better. People in this city are selfish and rude, and there's a lot of them. Everyone's always honking in their cars or yelling at the cars for honking at them. It's just uncomfortable to watch. But even when I'm with my friends, all we do is complain about our work and our lives. We say bad things about people we don't really know and do a lot of judging. Even when it's just me with one other friend walking down the street, our conversations mostly consist of saying mean things about people we don't know and then laughing at ourselves.
So I decided this whole fixing my environment needed to start with me. Right there on that street in Shanghai, I told my friend Zoe that our joint New Year's resolution should be to stop making fun of people we don't know. Start small, right? Now I know it's going to be hard to keep up but I legitimately want to try. We also decided that if we felt like saying something about someone we saw, we would just compliment each other, and if one of us started to say something mean or negative, our code word to stop was also a compliment to one another. I thought it would be a good way to not only stop the negativity, but to negate the negativity completely. We made it through the first day of the year with only one or two slip ups between the two of us, but for the most part, it worked!
Each year I think it's important to set new personal goals for yourself to make the 2016 you a better version than the 2015 one. After all, if we're not changing for the good, how can we grow? It will certainly be a challenge, but as my psychologist would always tell me, people don't make you feel anything. It's your reaction that determines how you feel about something, and, contrary to popular belief, we are in complete control control of our reactions (unless, you know, someone jumps out from behind a corner and scares you or something).
And I've found through this day of not speaking negatively, that I stop thinking about it, which has caused me to feel less angry and frustrated about all the negative things around me, which also causes me feel more relaxed and relieved, which then causes me to feel happy! It sounds cheesy, but it made my first day of the year a really awesome day. I know that doing all of this is not specific to adults, but I felt more like an adult today because of it. And I really like feeling like an adult. Anyways, I hope that by sharing my resolution with you Facebook people, I've inspired at least a few of you to not just remove negativity from your life, but to remove it from yourself. Like Michael Jackson told us, when you wonna make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a chayange nananaaaanananaaaananaaaaaa.
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