2023 has begun and for many of us, we are struggling much like Sisyphus with our own annual boulders.

We are fresh, renewed, ready and excited. 
The year starts and we explode with force, moving the boulder.

Up.
Up.
Up.

It gets harder and harder, and then eventually we let our old self — our fragments we wish to shed — back into our lives.

Just the small taste of that old and comfortable self is sometimes all it takes to lose grip on that boulder…

It rolls back down and we accept it.

But, don’t accept it.
Don’t allow the shards of the person you are trying to crush and kill to come back like so many zombie limbs, scratching and crawling from the fresh “2022 Me” grave.

Temptation will rear it’s head — especially early on! — begging, taunting, and inviting you “Just a taste…remember how you were?”

Ignore it, slamming the door of your mind in its face. Do it every single day, every single hour.

Sacrifice is taking something in the now and killing it — literally or metaphorically — in order to try for something greater in the future.

You have offered up your old self for sacrifice that it may die off in its myriad and flawed pieces in order that you be reforged, but one day at a time, now.

So avoid the old self.
Tell it as firmly as you can “No — I am not you. You are you. I am me. Me now will be dead, tomorrow, and tomorrow’s me will be ever greater than I!”

Follow for daily philosophical meditations.

These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”