I think it has now been universally accepted that 2016 was a bit of a rubbish year; we lost many much loved celebrities, politics around the world has gone a bit mental and there seem to have been more terrorist attacks in 2016 than in any other year I can remember; but while the wider world may have been having a bit of a tough time, I feel like I had a pretty good year overall.
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| A good year, represented by a cow selfie |
When we're in the middle of a less than ideal time it can be easy to look back and wallow on all those things that may not have gone exactly to plan, but look a little deeper and I'm sure that for most of us there was much more good in this year than there was bad. For me, 2016 has yet again been a year of change, which can be stressful and uncertain but in the end when I look back at my year I can't think of anything that I regret or wish that I had done differently.
I started 2016 with the decision to come back to the UK after two years of living in China; it wasn't an easy decision and it is something that I do occasionally struggle with even now. How can you ever know if it is the right decision to flip your world on it's head? I don't think you can ever know for certain and eventually it reaches a point where you just have to follow your heart. For me, coming back to the UK felt a little bit like a step back - I was coming back to my life pretty much exactly as I had left it two years ago and I was pretty certain that I was going to head back to China to study Mandarin for a year. But, as is often the case, things didn't exactly go as I was expecting. I didn't get on to one of those elusive and coveted graduate schemes but what I did find was a different job that I never would have even considered if i hadn't spent that time in China; I was going to become a travel agent.
Again, to a lot of people around me this might have seemed a step backwards...it wasn't the high flying job that I imaged for myself but as it turns out getting paid to talk about your passion all day long isn't really a bad thing! I've now been in this job for a little over 6 months and it's certainly been a learning curve. I've had days where I've questioned whether I should have stayed in China and I've had days where I've wondered if I'm wasting my time when I should be building a "career"; but ultimately I know that I have made the right decisions for me at the end of the day and I love the life I have built back in the UK. But, just because I made the choice to stay still, that doesn't mean that I don't still have that persistent urge to travel - I don't think wanderlust can ever be cured. So in between planning honeymoons and round the world trips for other people I have managed to get away and continued doing what I love the most, travel. It's definitely not the same as living abroad or spending an extended period of time travelling but wanderlust or not I love my life in London, I have a job I love in an industry I am truly passionate about, I work with some fantastic people, and I am surrounded by the loveliest and most supportive friends that anyone could ask for. In the grand scheme of things, as the year draws to a close I can't help but think how very lucky I am and how I really have nothing to complain about.
Yet despite this, at New Year people often look back on their year that has just passed and analyse what went well and what went not so well, and then from that we make New Years resolutions. These resolutions are all well and good but most of them are empty promises to ourselves. Apparently, a third of New News resolutions are broken by the end of January and I imagine that percentage rises as the year goes on to make the whole idea of resolutions slightly pointless.
I think we all like the idea of clean slates and new beginnings, and as one year turns into the next it gives us all the perfect excuse to say we're going to start anew. But what really changes as that clock strikes midnight? Not a lot - but that's okay. I think that the best changes happen when we least expect them, they're not planned, they're not structured, they just happen when the time is right. So this year I'm not going to make any empty promises for a "new year new me", this year I'm just going to simply focus on the things I love most and are most important to me: travelling, my friends...the little things that make me happy. Hopefully if I focus on these things then the year will get off to a good start without having to change all that much, after all if we can come out of 2016 healthy and happy how badly can 2017 really go?
Happy New Year to Everyone
I started my year as a mean for it to go on, surrounded by friends.
Here's to 2017!
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