Berwick Thought for the Week: My take on a New Year Resolution

Starting anew – whether its a New Year, or a new chapter in life – has something of a ‘cliff edge’ experience about it. Can I risk it? Do I have the courage? It’s a challenge we encounter at many points in our lives.

Generosity is also a valuable ingredient and an empathy for the hard reality of others’ lives.

This came home to me the other day when I heard how the rugby league legend Kevin Sinfield stopped short of the finish at the inaugural Rob Burrow Leeds Marathon to carry his friend Rob over the line so they could finish together, after pushing him round in a specially adapted wheelchair.

It’s a tough world out there and it can be a lonely one. As I get older, I know from experience that living in the present moment is the best way to confront it.

So, my New Year Resolution is to live each day as if it were my last.

Another spiritual guide has written: ‘We don’t prepare for death by withdrawing from life; the opposite is true. We get ready for death by beginning to live our lives as we should have been living them all along’.

That, surely, is a New Year’s resolution worth making!

In a world blighted by so much misinformation, we need to be very careful with words. But all the more reason to try to speak words of truth. With former experience as a lawyer and law lecturer, and subsequently a Church of England vicar, writing and speaking words of faith has always been my aspiration.