NO MORE RESOLUTIONS FOR ME

Today is January 1, 2008. My wife and I stayed up and brought in the New Year in our typical quite manner. We had some friends over. Ate dinner, played games, talked and laughed. They left around ten-thirty. We cleaned up; then settled in to watch Dick Clark countdown to 2008 in time with the big ball of New York’s Time Square. We kissed, hugged and headed for bed grateful for the uneventful beginning to our upcoming year.

The BIG question everyone asks is “What is your New Year’s Resolution?” The top four are: 1) Lose weight; 2) Exercise; 3) Quit smoking; 4) Have fun. And, of course, the majority of resolutions are forgotten by February first. It is for this reason my resolution is NOT to make a resolution! That is correct…NO MORE RESOLUTIONS FOR ME.

Instead of resolutions I am going to have “try-solutions.” These are things I will TRY to do. And if I don’t keep them long term, at least I will have tried. This way I can celebrate for as many know, it is better to have tried and failed then to have never tried at all. I can celebrate my “trys” and not bemoan my failures.

Here are my 2008 “try-solutions:”

I will try to keep my consistency in exercise
I will try to listen more and talk less
I will try to let my wife know I love her in other ways then simply saying it
I will try to call my kids more
I will try to call my mom regularly
I will try to cultivate my relationship with God more consistently
I will try to live outside my comfort zone
I will try to speak honestly, but not harshly
I will try to determine what is REALLY important and do that
I will try to be more transparent even if it costs me something

There are more, but this will suffice for now. Try-solutions: A new bent on an old tradition. What might you try this year?