I’m not waiting until 2017 to start anew. Dates are arbitrary, but the sun is not. Yesterday was the Winter Solstice; the shortest day of the year. From here on out, it’s only going to get brighter. So instead of the traditional New Years Resolutions, I’m starting today. And they won’t be called “resolutions” because the very word is redundant. The solution didn’t work the first time, so you are trying it again? That is the very act of insanity – trying the same thing over and over again and you don’t understand why nothing changes.

I will call these “new-solutions” for a new season. The holidays get people in a mood for both nostalgia and change. Which is a very weird place to be. An exhausting place to be. People stress about keeping traditions alive, when the only tradition that seems to stay in place year after year is the act of being stressed. Then people put pressure on themselves to act as hedonistic as possible, because they believe some magic clock with allow them to be better after the holiday season is over. If a personal trainer, a college admissions rep, and Oprah showed up on your porch on New Years Day morning, you wouldn’t be ready to jump into changing your life. You’d probably call the cops.

This time, I’m taking my cues from the sun. It wasn’t showing up lately, but it is slowly coming around again. So slowly, I will come around. And I will become brighter and warmer because of it.

Cultivate a healthy outlook on life. It is NOT easy to do, and the results aren’t immediate. Today we know SO much about the world that we are starting to become numb to the outrage, the sadness, and the disgust. We see more atrocities today than anyone in history ever has, because we have the ability to see them all at once. In one screen shot of a Twitter feed you can see a dead child refugee from Syria, a crippled town in Canada due to wildfires, and women lying bleeding in the streets of Manila. In a 30 second scroll on CNN, you can read about anti-LGBTQ legislation, a terrorist attack in Europe, and a new heroin epidemic that has now reached our nation’s elderly.

How is one person supposed to process this? If news editors can do it, why can’t I? If photojournalists on the street of Aleppo can keep going, why can’t I process these images? But then I need to remind myself, it’s the same reason I can’t perform surgery or fly a plane. It isn’t my job. Sure, it’s my duty as a human being to feel empathy, but it is not my obligation to read every article and know about every injustice in the world. I need to focus on having optimism in the face of adversity.

For the new season, I vow to look at both sides of a problem. And not just the left-side and the right-side, the conservative and the liberal, the male gaze and the female gaze. I mean look at the path that leads up to the story, and the path leading away from it. Terrorism and wars aren’t zits that just pop up overnight. They are festering cancer cells that have been slowly eating away at the strong, healthy cells for a long time, but goes unnoticed until the pain reaches the surface.

Those are big problems, but the perception can be applied to an even smaller scale. For example, I don’t know why I scaled back reading books this year. Was there too much on TV? Was I preoccupied with wedding planning? Was I exhausted from reading all those news articles?

I could answer questions or I could start the path away from this disappointment in myself. I could pick up a book and read it. I could even start writing a book. Or write a blog post. Hey look at that, already on the path! And soon it will be paved and named Lower It Up Road and will have 13 Starbucks on it.

Love my relationships. I think a real marker of adulthood is when you realize you would rather have a few close friendships than hundreds of friends. There has to be an evolutionary reason behind this. When you are younger, you are constantly changing and trying out other people around you who are constantly changing. However, when you get older and start to build your “village,” you want people you know to the core. You want to believe that this person won’t throw you to a lion so they can escape. You want a person you can trust with your child, and not worry that they will eat them or trade to a neighboring tribe for beads or wine. You want a person who will nurture you when you are sick, and not leave you in a leper colony. Or trade for more wine.

For the new season, I vow to appreciate and love my relationships. Each one is so unique and needs special attention. And obviously I’m making fun of people for calling millennials “special snowflakes.” If you treated every relationship in your life as the same, you would be considered a textbook sociopath. Or a cult leader. Just like growing a garden, each flower and vegetable needs something different. Some need to be showered with more affection, and some a perfectly content to be left alone until they start to be eaten by a deer. Some need a to stay in one place to put down roots, and others could thrive being re-potted over and over again. Some people hate gardening and want to talk about something else. And some people hate analogies and just want you to be real with them. And bring over wine.

Be patient with myself. Impatience is a useless emotion. And it just makes you look like a dick. It’s often shown outside with sighing, glaring, and muttering under one’s breath. When you are a kid, impatience usually involves not being able to sit still and asking incessant questions. When a little kid is impatient, they are trying to process why they can’t have what they want. So we teach kids to be patient for events, like Christmas or birthdays or Sesame Street episodes. However, somewhere along the way, kids learn to be impatient with people. If someone isn’t moving fast enough or grasping new information quick enough, we change from impatient to frustrated. But what happens when we become impatient with ourselves? We can’t understand something and immediately assume we are stupid. We are late for work and blame it on ourselves for being lazy and not waking up in time. It’s exhausting.

For the new season, I vow to be patient with myself and then work on being patient with others. It will be a lot easier to have empathy for others if I can forgive myself for being human first. I will give people the benefit of the doubt before immediately cursing them to the seventh circle of hell (or wherever people go who don’t use their blinker). I don’t deserve a second chance, if I’m not willing to give others a second chance (or third or fourth). I will remember that I was not put on earth to complain. I was put on earth to breathe and experience everything else in between those breaths. And some of those experiences are going to be shitty and gut-wrenching. But then I will get to the other side of those and find the good. I will remember that focusing on myself first is not selfish. I will put my oxygen mask on first, I will inhale and exhale, and then I will help others.