New Years Resolution

My first post of the year was not a New Years resolution post which seemed to upset some people. Truth be told back home we don’t do the whole NY resolutions thing. Yes ending a year is a huge milestone, but like my sister recently said I don’t really feel as if it has to be a specific day or time of the year to set a bunch of goals.

I am a goal oriented person as it is, I think I would go crazy if on top of all my existing goals I had to come up with a whole list at the beginning of each year. I celebrate the end of the year and welcome the new one the same way everyone does, actually we have a couple of ‘cultural differences’ that I thought it would be fun to share…

New Years Eve of any given year,  if you were a fly on the wall in a Spanish household while everybody gets ‘dolled up’ and pretty to go out and celebrate with friends and/or family, you would notice one thing .. red lingerie, and I am not just talking about women, men do too wear red undies to welcome the New Year. It is no surprise to anybody that us Spaniards identify with the color red, I am not really sure why that is, and I don’t even know if that is even related to the whole red underwear tradition for NY, but I know that 15 years away from home have not been enough for me to break that tradition.

A very common scene at Spanish local markets on the last week of the year

We also toast with champagne, like here, but we put a gold piece of jewelry in our drink for good luck. In addition we make a point to cross our legs with the right leg over the left, and as soon as we toast we step in with our right foot, I am sure you get the idea but for those lost out there is to start the year with ‘the right foot’. Lastly, as the clock strikes 12 we eat 12 grapes, I remember being a kid and having the hardest time to fit all 12 in my mouth, apparently as we get older not only our mouth gets bigger but I have become a lot more efficient at chewing and swallowing and eating 12 grapes in less than 15 seconds doesn’t seem to be a problem anymore.

The very last thing we do in the hopes of having a successful New Year, is to burn our red underwear. Basically symbolizing the end of the old year and starting fresh.  Raquel and I added one more tradition, since we never know for sure where we’ll be for New Years Eve, we always celebrate the Spanish New Year. So by 6 o’clock we have already done all of the above with our family in Spain, celebrating over the phone is far from perfect but is better than nothing.

Everybody celebrates the New Year differently, and everybody sets their goals differently. I have known people who like to share their goals with the world, me on the other hand I am a bit more reserve, I will share some but there is always something on the back of my mind that only me and me know. That is why this time of the year is so fascinating to me, I see people talking about what they are planning on doing for the New Year, and not that I have anything against it but there are sometimes a  consequently some people who amaze me.

I do respect those that follow the ‘reach for the moon and you might hit a star’ philosophy, I tried to stay true to the quote but there seem to be a million different  versions, that one for some reason sounded like the ‘right one’ to me. I have always admired positive people, I try to be as positive as I can myself. I set goals that sometimes I can’t reach, those are the ones that keep me real, they remind me how human beings can have an off day, but I always try to be realistic.

You might set the same goal that your next door neighbor, but the way you position it plays a big part on how the outcome can affect you. We all know that by setting a goal we are automatically taking a risk to failure. Sometimes we don’t have control of everything (trust me, I have tried hard but somehow there are things that are just out of our control). So, why waste your time setting a goal based on something you have no control of? Since most of the people reading this are triathletes or have been competitive  athletes in their past (ex-swimmers, ex-gymnasts, ex-water polo players…) I will make it easy on everybody … lets say I have a race coming up, and I want to do great, I want to have the best performance yet, yes as a competitive nature person we would ALL want to be 1^st but there is only one first and the place you will end on a race is something you have no control over.

 You might have the race of your life, but others racing might do as well. You never know who you are going against and have no control on their performance, their training and/or their luck. I see people setting their goal at being ‘1^st’’, this usually works for professionals who know exactly who they are going against, but for an age grouper as myself I choose not to set a goal that might destroy my chance of having a great performance. If I keep focus on my race and somebody passes me, it is not the end of the world I will do my best to keep up but ultimately I have a plan which could be very well shut down if my goal for the race was to be 1^st in the first place, you can know your competition or at least you think you might know but don’t shut down your chance to reach the stars just by relaying on things you have no control over.