HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I am not big on New Year’s “resolutions”.  For the most part, I find them vague and unattainable.  Not to mention that my interest in keeping them wanes far faster than it should.

Instead of purposely setting myself up for failure at the end of each year, I have spent the last several years adopting “projects” for each new year.  Some years, there have been home improvement projects (cleaning closets, organizing kitchen drawers, getting rid of excess STUFF, etc.).  Other years, I have embarked on personal improvement projects (weight loss, learning to play the piano, reading more, etc.).  All in all, I have been more satisfied with the idea of the projects than I ever was with the resolutions.

Still, I can’t help but arrive at this time each year with some sense that something needs to change and that, if I set the correct mindset at the outset of the calendar with a new number at the end, this will be “THE YEAR”.  You know, the one that, in hindsight, will look and feel different from all those years that started well but ended the same.

For the last several weeks, I have tried to think of a way to incorporate the start of a new year with the continuum of my life and not just with the checklists that I love to organize and mark “complete”.  Somewhere in that process, the word “deliberate” came to mind, over and over again.  Not only did it come to mind but it began to appeal to me and feel necessary in a way that it never has.

I am not the first to conclude that being “deliberate” is worthwhile, if not necessary.  Because of that, it became clear that instead of resolutions or projects or random acts of whatever, my new year would be focused on the same thing that Henry David Thoreau sought to discover when he went to live in the rural area surrounding Walden Pond…

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

To that end, I am “adopting” this quote for this new year.  Let me make it very clear that I am NOT moving to the woods!  I am, however, making a commitment to focus concentrated attention on 4 areas of my life:

1. “TO LIVE DELIBERATELY” – material possessions and financial responsibility
2. “THE ESSENTIAL FACTS OF LIFE” – family, relationships and physical health
3. “WHAT IT HAD TO TEACH” – mental abilties
4. “WHEN I CAME TO DIE” – faith and eternal life

What will you focus on this coming year?