Do you make New Year Resolutions?  Do you plan them, or are they usually spur of the moment ideas?  Do you make the same one every year?  Do you make progress on it?  Sorry, I don’t mean to seem like I am grilling – you have someone in your life for that, I have no doubt.  I am merely curious, really.

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I remember in my childhood that we spent plenty of time at the dinner table talking about New Year Resolutions this time of year.  My mom would be captured by the idea of renewal and self-improvement on a mass scale for the first few weeks of each year and want to get us involved.  I don’t remember any of the actual resolutions that any of us made, of course.  The resolutions themselves were rather secondary to the intrigue of so many people embarking on new plans at the same time.

This was of course long before today’s media fascination, or should I say obsession, with Resolutions.  Maybe the media has just picked up on mom’s drum beat.

Dad was the list maker, and the head down, plow forward, get your chores done before fun kind of person.  He didn’t want to talk about getting things done, he wanted to get to it.  I’m pretty sure he mostly just listened to these conversations about resolutions.

I stopped making resolutions when I started to realize the repetitiveness involved and how few resolutions are actually acted upon.  I had a friend resolve last year to sparkle – I do hope that she came through on that one.  And I have a couple of other friends who have made big changes like healthier lifestyles and I admire their success.

It isn’t that I don’t have any need to improve aspects of my life, just that I don’t use resolutions to create progress on those fronts.  I have plenty of room for improvement.  I regularly resolve to keep on top of things, particularly finding ways to get myself to do the ones that I don’t like.  I just don’t do it around New Year with a capital R.

“We will open the book.  Its pages are blank.  We are going to put words on them ourselves.  The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.”

~ Edith Lovejoy Pierce

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Tagged: Life, New Year, Progress, Reflection, Resolution