{"id":5196,"date":"2022-05-26T21:47:55","date_gmt":"2022-05-26T21:47:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movesflash.com\/?p=5196"},"modified":"2022-05-26T21:47:55","modified_gmt":"2022-05-26T21:47:55","slug":"new-york-new-year-new-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/2022\/05\/26\/new-york-new-year-new-you\/","title":{"rendered":"New York New Year New You !"},"content":{"rendered":"
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New York is the kitchen and you are the recipe. And you can<\/strong><\/em>
\nadd any- and as many – ingredients to your personal dish as<\/strong><\/em>
\nyou like! And only you know the extra spices you add and<\/strong><\/em>
\nwhat\u2019s great is, nobody else cares. This is NEW YORK CITY!<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

By Hallie Smith<\/p>\n

We moved to New York for all sorts of reasons. But if we have one thing in common, it\u2019s a desire to reinvent our lives. And ultimately, reinvention is not about becoming someone else: it\u2019s about becoming one\u2019s self– expressing desires and dreams in new ways that for one reason or another we could not, or did not, do before. That takes guts, strength and most of all independence.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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They say if you can make it here you can make it anywhere. But that infamous \u201cit\u201d is a pretty big thing; its not just money, or career or image. That \u201cit\u201d is an entirely new life. It\u2019s more than material, it\u2019s a new you, which happens to be the real you. There\u2019s a great line in a Jeanette Winterson novel: \u201cWhat you risk reveals what you value.\u201d Well, you value independence and you\u2019ve risked the comforts of the past in order to achieve it. Knowing you can do this is its own reward and you are all the stronger for it. You\u2019ve learned the risk of being alone is less than being with the wrong person, and you realize being single at 30, while old friends are married and raising families, has its rewards.<\/p>\n

Reinvention, after all, is rooted in intuition, trusting your own voice (which at times might be all you have to rely on) and following it. Reinvention also means breaking with convention. You\u2019ve decided to follow your own path and there\u2019s no turning back now. Soon you realize you are changing and old insecurities and habits begin to fade. You are becoming a new person, more confident, and your independent life reflects that.<\/p>\n

So it\u2019s all going well until the holidays arrive and suddenly you realize your reinvented self has no plans. Even the strongest of us can begin to compare our newly emerging independent lives against the Hallmark card notion that being alone in December is a sign of an incomplete life. By spending the holidays alone, you are somehow missing out on middle-America\u2019s dream of security and convention\u2014the very state of mind you thought you\u2019d left behind in order to pursue your own kind of life. There can even be a strange desire for hauling a Christmas tree into a Manhattan apartment that was never designed for such a thing.<\/p>\n

There is also the state of self pity: pacing around a cramped and conspicuously tree-less apartment instead of walking the snowy sidewalks of a city you love or spending a day at a museum. Instead of appreciating the progress you\u2019ve made over the past year, you berate yourself, feeling like Bridget Jones, a woman you never would\u2019ve likened yourself to before you entered this state. Perspective askew, you no longer feel like the new you. Where is she? A sense of inadequacy takes over and you start thinking about how things have not turned out the way you planned and maybe the whole quest for independence wasn\u2019t such a good idea. But wait a minute, this mindset is just that\u2014and it is putting the reinvented you, who\u2019s learned to take pleasure in her new life, the one who is making it in New York, a city full of open and creative individuals, with chance meetings possible at any given moment.<\/p>\n

Besides, reinvention will never work when trying to fit a mold that doesn\u2019t really suit you. Reinvention is about improvement, but it\u2019s also about self acceptance. Maybe you are where you want to be in your life, maybe not, but reinvention is a project that\u2019s never finished. The point is that you\u2019re following the path that you have chosen. That\u2019s what a friend of mine calls a luxury problem. It\u2019s not a matter of food or shelter; it\u2019s a matter of what to do and how to spend your time–decisions a lot of people never have the opportunity, or responsibility, to make. Reinvention, you find, requires perspective and instead of feeling lonely you are excited. You lighten up a little. Solitude can be a great teacher and you find it doesn\u2019t have to be so solemn.<\/p>\n

So Christmas passes and along comes New Year\u2019s Eve and again you revert. The thought: \u201cbut everyone else has a date!\u201d repeats itself one too many times. But what about an alternative to desperately seeing a kiss; what about thinking about what we\u2019re really seeking? What really excites us? The point of reinvention is to lead a more satisfying life. And creating that life doesn\u2019t depend on the social calendar. It depends on visualization, not the \u201cwhat if I only had?\u201d mentality. The trick of it is better than Prozac: act as if you already have what you want, that you are the person you want to be. This might be the secret of those who are happy and those who are not, and perspective does alter reality. That might sound abstract, but physics has found that the way we look at an object actually changes its essence. So, if we look at our life, ourselves, even our time alone differently, these things will be affected accordingly. Who would\u2019ve thought Einstein would be easier than pop-psych?<\/p>\n

So, the holidays came and loneliness rang the doorbell and remembering your over-accommodating manners of days gone by, you not only answered, but let it in. But was the visit really that interesting? Is that the kind of company you want to hang around for days on end? Was there anything new to talk about or was it the same, tired out conversation: reruns of dissatisfaction?<\/p>\n

Reinvention is about the new. It is malleable and adapts to challenge. Loneliness is ultimately an obsession with what we lack and a way for us to hold ourselves back. It\u2019s seductive, the great distracter inside us, keeping us from seeing what\u2019s out there– pulling our attention and energy away from the world we are creating, from what we have accomplished, or what we will. It\u2019s like the old friend who doesn\u2019t want us to change. Misery loves company, but we\u2019d decided to dump it and move on. Isn\u2019t that why we decided to reinvent in the first place? Isn\u2019t that why we came from wherever we were to New York, to move our paths forward\u2014to get what we deserve? And if we\u2019re going to obsess, we might as well obsess over what we want, who we want to become.<\/p>\n

At the heart of reinvention is a desire to change, and loneliness is fear in disguise. The first wants to create and the latter wants to block that creativity. Reinvention is about seeking the open road\u2014or sidewalk\u2014and trusting it will get you where you want to be.<\/p>\n

In her essay titled Imagination and Reality, Jeanette Winterson\u2019s words apply again: \u201cThere is no limit to new territory. The gate is open. Whether or not we go through is up to us, but to stand mockingly on the threshold, claiming that nothing lies
\nbeyond, is something of a flat earth theory.\u201d
\nAnd she\u2019s not talking only about the physical path. The new territory originates from within and imagination is the starting point. Over the past several years there\u2019s been talk of a new class of people: the creative class. It\u2019s not limited to writers or artists; it\u2019s comprised of all types who are unified in their pursuit of lifestyles that better suit them. They\u2019ve followed their own visions and succeeded. Their qualities: guts, strength and most of all independence. Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

Those who reinvent themselves also reinvent society. They not only create better lives for themselves; they create culture. They create diversity. They raise questions about how we should live and find there is never one answer. They induce change. Imagine what would happen if they were afraid to stand on their own, if they were distracted by what they felt they didn\u2019t have, if they jumped into the sack with loneliness.<\/p>\n

And then there\u2019s the tried and true reality check: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Reinvention is ultimately a collective thing. Individual change is essential for personal fulfillment, but it also works on a larger scale. When people become who they really are, they not only evolve personally; they create great communities. And this island is documented proof of that. People don\u2019t only \u201cmake it\u201d in New York, they also make New York what it is. Despite the pressures of tradition, and its tendency to make us shift into reverse gear, we are moving forward, each of us doing our part.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s nothing wrong with Christmas trees and New Year kisses– but there\u2019s nothing wrong with lighting a candle just for yourself or planting something new under a grow light in your windowsill either. Personally, I go to The Strand on Broadway and look for new literature.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New York is the kitchen and you are the recipe. And you can add any- and as many – ingredients to your personal dish as you like! And only you know the extra spices you add and what\u2019s great is, nobody else cares. This is NEW YORK CITY! By Hallie Smith We moved to New […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5184,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-5196","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-featured"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5196\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dev2025-2-2.movesflash.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}