When overthinking gets in the way of making a fresh start

THIS MORNING, as I drank my morning tea, I looked out of my window and a tall shrub at the end of my garden caught my eye.

My father-in-law planted it when our children were small. It was a spindly thing with no flowers, and I confess I wasn’t that impressed by the imposed new addition to my border. However, my father-in-law was a quiet, patient man, and simply said, ‘Just wait, you’ll love it in the New Year’.

I don’t recall the name of it, but every January since then, around the second week, it has the most amazing pink blossom that lights up the garden against a backdrop of gloom and grey. I have no idea how it knows when to bloom, why the second week of January is different from the first, or even December, but bloom it does, and every January it makes me smile.

This morning, when I looked at it and smiled, it occurred to me how often we wait for new starts. At this time of year, it’s natural to start to think of the year ahead. It may be that this year you want to do something different, or change something, or reach a goal that has previously felt unobtainable. But what struck me is: why do we make new starts so challenging or restrict them in number?

In my experience, starting again is a big thing, whether it’s a job, a career, a goal or even within a relationship. We put so much on ‘starting again’ and what that means.

Whether it’s giving up so much for a change in direction, or laying to rest old arguments and disagreements or even, letting yourself off the hook without beating yourself up if you made a mistake, we can make starting again such a difficult, almost impossible experience.

However, when I looked at my beautiful shrub, it occurred to me for that plant, starting again was simply a part of life, and whilst it only did it once a year, when the time was right, it started again as easily as the sun rises.

It didn’t reflect on the past year. What if it was the same for us? What if we could start again, any time the time was right for us? Of course, plants can’t think. However, in many ways I think this is the key. So often it’s our personal thought that gets in the way of us starting again, what we think it means, or what people will say if we try something ‘again’, or maybe we think that because it’s happened before it will happen in the same way again.

However, what if our thinking was not as reliable as we thought it was? What if there was something else at play, something richer and deeper that could guide us as to whether starting again was a good idea?

We know when something is right for us, we feel it in a deeper way in what we may refer to as our ‘gut’.

Often I find that we reserve this feeling for the big stuff, however, what I have observed is that it is available to us all of the time, not just for special occasions.

When we listen to what we know is right, the opportunity to start again becomes easier and less fraught with ‘what if ’ thinking, it simply becomes part of our life, and is available to us at any time of year.