Infinite Inspiration: Taking stock of the past year

By Venkateswarlu Kadiveti
Staff Writer

Review, refresh and restart your life. This should be our mantra as we conclude one more beautiful year in our lives and as we welcome the New Year with new aspirations and dreams.

It’s time to get our Annual Report. This report is an assessment of how we spent our valuable lives for the past 365 days. It will provide a blueprint of what to do and what not to in the coming year.

Review the year carefully. Recollect and list all the details of your life in the past year. First include your physical, mental, spiritual, intellectual, financial, professional progress.

Secondly, make a list of how you are doing with your human relations — personal, professional and community. 

Lastly, make a list of all the decisions and choices you made and opportunities that you used and missed. Review and make an exhaustive report. The bigger the report, the more you gain in the coming year.

Reviewing life over a year gives you the power to recapture the moments that were lost due to your emotional state and for other reasons. You can analyze things more clearly now that you are emotionally free of them, and you will be able to approach them more rationally in a similar situation in future.

It’s a little like making a mistake in an exam and then realizing the right answer. If you come across the same question in another test, your likelihood of making the same mistake again is reduced.

Refreshing allows you to let go all that you do not need and move on with what matters to you. Once you review everything — just as you do with your computer — trash the unwanted files, treasure those memories that are worth cherishing and reformat yourself for the whole New Year.

Laugh at the silly mistakes you made in the past and commit to not repeating them. Pat yourself on the back for all your accomplishments. This will boost your confidence to launch yourself into the new challenges that await you. Believe that every challenge will reward you, as it did in the past.

We often misunderstand the definition of “restarting.” We think that we have to start everything afresh. This is the reason for our disappointment when we don’t fulfill our resolutions. Some of us even tire of making resolutions and resolve not to make any more!

But the fact is that when you make a resolution and fulfill it, even for a short time, you have accomplished something. As Confucius rightly observes, “It does not matter how slowly you go, as long as you do not stop.” So restarting, in its real sense, means starting from where you stopped, sometimes many times. Sooner or later, you will accomplish your goals.

”Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.” — Abraham Lincoln

So what are you waiting for? Review, refresh and restart your life. Now.

Venkateswarlu Kadiveti is a student in the International Dentist Program.