This is My Fresh Start

This is my admission to you — sometimes I am not the best person I can be. There are times when I can be a better, but I simply choose not to be. When I look back on those times where I messed up, I burn with regret.

For example, sometimes I lose my patience with the kids here in the Marshall Islands when all they really need is just that much more love.

“Mr. Tim, do you like Akon?” Laijab asks me.

“Get back to your seat, Laijab, we are having a test,” I say.

“You like his new album?”

“GET BACK TO YOUR SEAT!”

I could have, and should have, handled that differently. I could have told him that I was going to give him a great big bear hug if he didn’t go back to his seat. I could have tried to dance with him, I could have sang to him, I could have done a hand stand or I simply could have asked him again to sit down — anything would have been better than getting angry with him.

Also, sometimes I am not the nicest guy to my family when they have flown thousands of miles to a tiny speck of coral floating in the Pacific even though they have been my biggest supporters in this life of mine and I owe almost all to them.

“Tim, we want to leave at nine tomorrow,” my aunt Glenda says.

“Nine is so early,” I whine.

“Well, it is not that early,” she tells me. “When we went to Laura Beach we left at eight.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” I snap. “I was driving!”

If I could rewind that tape it would be different. Maybe a “thanks for the suggestion,” or a “well, to be honest that seems too early for me, do you think we could go a little later?” would have been more appropriate. No one deserves to be treated rudely when they are simply trying to help with planning.

There are many other things I did in 2007 that I am not proud of. I didn’t write some of my best friends half as much as I should of, I sometimes littered when I didn’t see a trash can, sometimes I pretended in conversation that I had read a book when in reality I had not even touched that book, I secretly liked to gossip when I openly condemned it, I drank orange juice straight from the container — even when it was not my orange juice, it was my roommate’s, and I had no right to drink it, I lied, I cheated at card games, I settled on bad lesson plans when I could have made good ones and I judged those I don’t know just to name a few.

You know what though? It doesn’t matter. Something incredible happened. January first came and left and it wiped my slate clean. In the middle of the street, as one of the first people in the world to bring in 2008, I kissed my girlfriend, danced to Marshallese rock-a-billy music and breathed the sweet smell of a fresh start.
The fact that the sweet new year fresh start reaked of drunk-man vomit did not dampen my optimism.

I won’t be perfect in the new year — nobody well — but I will try and improve as much as I can.

Whoever invented New Year’s was a genius. He put a reset button on life. There are many things we cannot control in this life. We have no say who our parents are, if we are smart or dumb or if we are tall or short but what we can control is what we do when that reset button is pressed. It is our chance to try and improve.
This is my admission to you — I plan on trying my hardest.


The love you give comes back in the end.
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