I Suck At New Year's Resolutions

Now that it's nearly the end of April, I thought it would be a good time to check in on my New Year's Resolutions.

OK, so I'm one for three. I guess I'm not doing so well. Let's review in a little more detail:

1. I will continue to purge my house of unnecessary things. We've been doing pretty well in this category. I recently gave a large bin of clothes to a friend for her son and also gave away a dresser that we advertised on the local Facebook garage sale group. We still have a long way to go, but I feel like more things are going out the door than in lately.
2. I will learn to play piano and guitar. Here's where I have really failed. I went through a period of about two weeks where I played my guitar every few days but that's it. I also haven't touched the piano since my lesson with my daughter.
3. I will write more. I was doing better here until about a month ago. I even tried signing up for Jeff Goins' "My 500 Words" writing challenge. It's a great challenge and I highly recommend it, but unfortunately I wasn't able to stick with it. I got too wrapped up in trying to not just write, but write something worth posting on my blog and that became too much.

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I don't usually make any New Year's Resolutions, but I thought this would be a good year to make some. I purposely kept my list short hoping to have a chance at sticking with them, but no dice. Part of my problem is that the company I work for recently closed the office I was working in and now I spend over two hours a day in the car. I thought about using my phone to do some dictation while I'm in the car but couldn't find a good solution. I'm also hesitant since that's not much different than talking on the phone while driving and believe it or not, that's really not safe even with a hands-free device. I once ran over something I had placed on my garage floor while talking to my dad using a Bluetooth speaker. I knew it was there, but wasn't paying enough attention to notice it until I heard the crunching sound. Anyway, I digress.

Maybe the problem isn't that I suck at New Year's Resolutions. Maybe, it's that resolutions are a dumb idea, or at least that I'm going about them the wrong way. I probably shouldn't have picked out things that I thought I had spare time to work on over the year, when my priorities and interests constantly change. I'm going to stick with the first and the third one, but I've decided I'll hammer away at the guitar a little more but may eventually just get rid of it. Then I won't have to feel guilty about not playing it.

Several years ago, a friend from church, who worked at a hospital, came across some handwritten resolutions at work. They were the type of resolutions that I should have made and probably, we should all be making. Each one was a resolution to be more like a character from the Bible. They read something like "I resolve to be more brave like David was when facing Goliath", except they were written far more eloquently than I could ever make them sound. My friend gave me a copy and I kept it for a long time before I finally tossed it out when I was cleaning my desk one day. When my friend passed away last year, I realized it's one of the few things I've ever thrown out that I wish I would have kept. I assumed that like most things, I could find it online somewhere but the list continues to elude me. When I do find a copy, I'll be sure to post it.

In the future, I think I'll skip the New Year's Resolutions. I don't like the idea of making promises that I'm most likely not going to keep. Instead, maybe I'll try one of these ideas from Psychology Today. The article is a few years old, but has some interesting ideas like making a list of your favorite accomplishments from the past year or imagining the highlights of the coming year. The point of all of this is that we all want to be better people than we are now, I think. Except maybe for Donald Trump. He seems to think he's perfect as is. For the rest of us, however, I wish good luck to us all.