The conventional Happy New Year approach is to think of the New Year as something that happens outside of our selves.  It is a good luck wish that the New Year, in some magical way, will bring us our heart’s desire.  We look to the New Year to make us happy.  When we expect happiness to come to us from the outside, we are usually disappointed.  Happiness is not guaranteed by sunny weather, a raise in pay, a new car, a beautiful home or anything else of a material nature.  External things are often possessed by very unhappy people.  Happiness does not come out of a New Year, it comes out of men and women.  Life does not change when we hang a new calendar on the wall or when the clock strikes midnight and a New Year begins.  The only way life will change for us is when we change ourselves.

Wilferd A. Peterson