This is a weekly series I’m writing in 2016 to focus on one of my three words for the year: beauty. Each Monday a post will explore some aspect of beauty that I’ve been considering. Read more about my focus words of the year.

February 1st. The beginning of a new month. The start of a new chapter. The chance to begin again; to start anew. A clean slate. An unwritten chapter. And all those other cliche phrases for beginning again. The start of a new month always has me thinking of the beauty of beginning again.

The start of the New Year usually spurs us on to beginning again; making some resolutions, setting some goals, marking out a new course for us on how we want to progress in the 365 days ahead of us. But beginning again doesn’t just have to be something we embark on when the calendar flips to a new year. It can be something we do at the start of a new month, heck, even at the start of a new day or a new hour.

I suppose that’s the beauty of the human person - the will and the intellect. We don’t have to wait for a seemingly natural moment to begin again. We can do it whenever we set our mind to it. The day didn’t go as planned? Begin again the next day with a firm resolution to do better. We didn’t respond the way we wanted to when talking with a friend; begin again with a simple sorry. We botched the work day with distractions or laziness; begin again with the zeal to word harder, to do better. We didn’t get to the gym… we didn’t say no to that triple-chocolate cheesecake… we didn’t say no to last night’s Netflix binge… begin again. A fresh start every month, every day, every hour, even every minute if we need to.

There is a beauty in being able to start again. The other animals don’t have that luxury. They aren’t able to contemplate what went wrong with today’s quest for food or in attracting a mate. But we humans get that luxury. We get to determine our own future. We get to decide how we react in each situation. We get to decide how we will live each day. We get to decide who we interact with and who we give our time and attention to. We have that freedom.

So here’s to the start of a new month. To beginning again. To resetting priorities. To renewing goals To establishing new resolutions. To forging new friendships. To becoming a better version of ourselves. To really and truly beginning again, and again, and again as needed.