Good luck with those New Years resolutions, if you made them. As we enter the new year, what matters is not what we said we would do, but how we live and how we act.

May I suggest an aim for the year ahead that is not another of those maybe-I-will, maybe-I-won’t night-before resolutions, but a simple directive oriented towards action:

I will bring something new into my world.

This is the very definition of the creative act.It applies to any field of action, from art to auto repair, from philosophy to childcare. It involves a conscious encounter with our chosen field, which may be as large and loose as whatever is going on around us in everyday life, or as specific as a chosen calling, whether that is golf or metaphysics or cooking. As Rollo May reminds us, memorably, in The Courage to Create: “Creativity is the encounter of the intensely consciously human being with his or her world.”

It demands courage, because you are going to go beyond the limits you have accepted for yourself or taken on from others. It requires you to find your edge, and work from that edge.

It is a call you do not want to refuse, at this point in your life, with a new year before you. Rollo May, with blazing clarity, tells us why:

If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.

The universe may or may not be interested in whether you lose twenty pounds. But the animate world is very interested in you – and will support you in unexpected ways – when you dare to make it your game to bring something new to it and join in the ways of creation.

What’s that? You don’t think you have anything new to contribute? Reach beyond the little mind that talks that way. Listen to your dreams, and the many voices of the speaking land around you. Open to the possibility that if you will only risk a little more, you will draw forces that will inspire and sustain you. First among those forces is your own creative spirit, who tends to go away when you are repeating yourself, bound to the cycle of samo-samo.

What have you got to lose by making this your action imperative?. Say the words out loud

I will bring something new into my world.

and see what answers, and gives you the power to develop the form for what you will create. Then go to it – do something physical, immediately, to show the universe, and your creative spirit, that you mean it. Pick up the paintbrush, climb the mountain, write the damned book proposal and send it off, sign up for that weird class, make that dish no one would ever expect to see on the table.