let inevitable change fuel your *why*

 ​Dear Why Team members... Happy New Year!

While all of us begin anew every morning when we awake, the bringing of a New Year seems to hold more significance for us.

Why?

Maybe because we are collectively recognizing that something has ended and something new has begun.  For many years now I have reflected on the year just passed as my best - be it filled with ease, fun and distraction, or filled with strife, struggle and perseverance.  Upon greater reflection, however, I have come to find that...

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...I live more fully in the face of adversity and appreciate all the more the people in my life when times are most challenging.  Welcoming whatever the New Year will bring seems to always be the best course of action - resistance being a choice to suffer.  

Life *is* change and so celebrating a New Year is celebrating both life and death; the death of the old and the birth of the new.  We all have only so many years on earth.  Tomorrow is promised to no one.  But instead of causing us fear and anxiety, let it fuel greater appreciation for another day, week, month and year.  Celebrating a New Year is celebrating the preciousness of life itself.  If this next year was your last year on earth, and you knew it, how would you live it?  No doubt with more intentionality, more joy and more gratitude.  

Most of us have looked for love in all the wrong places, coming up short time and again.  Could what we seek be already with us?  I think so.  Anais Nin said "We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are."  Imagine becoming more in this New Year of your life - more present, more appreciative, more engaged, more loving and patient with yourself.  Will this New Year bring you new abilities to see?  Undoubtedly.
Our days are numbered, but let this be our fuel to live them more purposefully, being more lovingly open to all that life brings us, including the travails, for they may be the greatest gifts of all.  When we stay more open to what experience has to teach us, we can start to see all that life brings us as a gift - for us to learn, leverage and use to serve ourselves and others.
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May this New Year, lived with greater acceptance and appreciation, open you more fully to the possibilities that have always been there waiting for you.

Happy New Year!

Steve Luckenbach