Edel Coffey: When every year feels like a gift, the least I can do is stay up to welcome the year in

Edel Coffey: I will welcome in the new year in the same way as I have done every year since my children were born. Picture: Ray Ryan

I’ve never been a New Year’s Eve person. In my mind it’s second only to St Patrick’s Day for the kind of chaotic Bacchanalian behaviour that descends on the country. I prefer to avoid that kind of unpredictability. And then there’s all of that ‘new year, new you’ guff to take on board. A sense of obligation to take yourself in hand. Even if you’re perfectly content with your life, it’s hard to resist the temptation to impose a new plan on the blank slate of an unblemished year stretching out in front of you. All that potential just waiting to be shaped.

This year will be different; this year will be better; this year will be the year; the year of you; the year you achieve everything you’ve always dreamed of. It’s a sort of madness really. We go out on New Year’s Eve and then start the new year feeling under the weather, slightly blue, and demotivated. It’s no way to do it. It puts us on the back foot.

So how to get around this? Well, a plan is a good place to start. Waking up on the first of January with a hangover and no sense of purpose in the cold January light can be a bleak start to a new year. We are already in a place of enforced reflection, and taking stock but to have to do that while contending with ‘The Fear’ is a terrible way to start.

I like to have a distraction in place on New Year’s Day, something small that I have arranged to do, a date in the diary for lunch, brunch, or even a walk in a local beauty spot for a chat and a coffee with a friend, or a plan to browse the shops together. Because of the day that’s in it, chances are you might talk out your hopes and plans and dreams for the coming year, which is a good thing to do I think, if you’re not putting too much pressure on yourself. It’s a way of feeling like you have a bit more control over your life as the year begins.

I’m not a big planner but I do like to ask myself what I would like to happen in the coming year or what my best case scenario for the year ahead might look like. I try to figure out a few goals, usually just one or two, not too many as I find it’s easier to focus on and achieve one or two. And while they might be wild dreams I still try to imagine a practical path that might take me to the dream; steps that might lead to the achievement of the goal.

Personally, I don’t do resolutions in the traditional sense — the giving things up approach. I think it’s a mean and grim mindset in which to start a new year. Telling yourself that you’ve had your two weeks of fun but that’s all over now. Now is the time for deprivation, punishment, misery and it’s also January.

Why would we start a new year in such a negative state of mind? Instead, I like to take things up for the new year. It might just be a decision to take up a healthier lifestyle, so instead of saying I’m not going to eat sweets, I tell myself I’m going to take a healthier approach to my diet. It’s a subtle difference in language but it’s a huge difference in terms of how it feels to implement it in your life. It’s about approaching something from a positive place rather than a place of punishment and deprivation. I know myself well at this point. If I see something as a positive experience, I’m more inclined to do it. If I see something as a punishment, I’m likely to hide from it, avoid it or shirk it at any opportunity or cost.

So what are my ‘resolutions’ for this year? I haven’t quite figured them out yet but after a very busy 2022, one is try to have a more balance in my life, to free up some ‘nothing’ time in which to do, well, nothing. I’d like to write a little more too.

As for what I will do tonight. I will welcome in the new year in the same way as I have done every year since my children were born. Not in a nightclub or at a party with fireworks and champagne corks popping, or even sleeping through the whole thing with the ignorant assumption of youth — that I will get to see many more new year’s eves — but sitting up and welcoming it in.

Now, when every year feels like a gift, the least I can do is stay up to welcome the year in. It seems important now as I get older to witness the new year’s dawn, to say, come in, sit down, have a glass of champagne, and let’s talk about what we might do together this year.

I might be in my pyjamas but I will be there, to witness and welcome the new year, and everything it might hold.