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With each New Year, opportunities for change and renewal arise; a time when fresh ideas, hopes and wishes are born. It is true that we can ignite change at any moment in our lives – that we needn’t wait until the first of the month, or Monday, or for the elusive ‘perfect moment’ to begin – but there is something wondrous and welcoming about the start of a New Year; a blank canvas for which our dreams and creativity await form and application.

But when faced with a blank canvas, what should we paint? What hues should we select and what if we run out of colour halfway through? Worse still – what if we stare woefully at the blank page before us, a sense of rising dread as we consider our forgotten finesse for creativity?

In answer to these very real and experienced questions, I invite you to cast your mind back to when you were a child. Rarely, as children, did we ever stop to ponder our ability to create when faced with fresh pots of paint and paper. Instead, with little hesitation, we’d dive in, barely stopping to roll up our sleeves as we repeatedly dipped our brushes, in and out. It didn’t matter if the colours became mixed or the paper became saturated and soaked. Nor did we care if our brush strokes were sloppy and without direction. After splashing a myriad of colour in every which way, we’d pause – and then confidently state our masterpiece, even if it looked nothing of the sort: “Look – a house! A sun! A crocodile!”

Children don’t analyse their visions and dreams, they simply create according to their own unique perspective.

So don’t fret if, as you pen down your wish to lose fifteen pounds or more, you are nibbling away at the left over Christmas chocolates, or dousing your front with fallen crumbs of turkey and cranberry sandwiches.

Today is for creative dreaming, the doing will surely follow.

In love and light,

Hayley xx