My New Years Resolutions

Here is my list of New Years Resolutions.

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Well, that's the short list. The long list is actually not any longer. The truth is, I make resolutions to myself all year long, with absolutely the best intentions, but soon the real me emerges, I forget and then just go about life the same as before. So why worry about resolutions. Duguet once said "The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention." To be honest, I have no idea who Duguet even is, but he sure made up a great quote.

Most of us are programmed from birth and childhood to live life in a certain way. I am currently reading a book called "Upside Down, A Primer for the Looking Glass World". It is an excellent book so far about this issue--reality. I am only a few chapters into it ; but I highly recommend it from what I have read so far. Here is a brief excerpt:

"Fast food, fast cars, fast life: from birth, rich kids are trained for consumption and speed, and their voyage through childhood confirms that machines are more trustworthy than people. When the day arrives for the rite of passage, they will be handed the keys to their first four-wheel-drive all-terrain corsair. In the meantime they construct identities by driving full speed down cybernetic highways, devouring images and merchandise, zapping and shopping. They feel at home navigating cyberspace the way homeless children do wandering city streets."

I began my life in the fifties and now I am once again in the fifties, but this time the age is a little more personal. My natural inclination, when I am not thinking consciously, is to fall back on the way things have always been for me. I simply do what I know and not necessarily what is right. What seems perfectly natural, my reality, is not necessarily what is perfectly natural and may even be harmful for me. But it is what I learned in my early life and is what I know. Unless, of course I seek a better way. As a late baby boomer, I grew up in the "disposable" decades. I learned to buy things, use them, then just throw them away and let them become someone else's problem. Out of sight, out of mind. That is, unless, for example, I travel to the middle of the Pacific where a vast swirl of floating plastic twice the size of Texas exists and will never go away. Oops. Oh well, someone else will fix that...right? I mean they always do...right? You know like the landlord or the maintenance guy or...

So anyhow back to my resolutions. This year, no more resolutions. Not on the first day of the year or even on the three-hundred-sixty-fifth. This year I hope to unlearn a few more of my basic learned instincts from childhood and then do a few small good deeds instead. Just like Duguet said. I hope you will too.

I do plan some change this year to my blog. Hours and hours sitting and staring at a computer for quite a few years has exacerbated an eye condition I have so, by necessity, I have been scaling back my screen time. That is not very easy for me since I love to Google and research lots of things. Input...need input. My goal this year for the blog is to post on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Three times per week instead of the five or six, or sometimes more I was doing. Some have commented to me, and they are right, that my blogs sometimes tend to be long. We live in an abbrev. world now and so I will strive to be more succinct and less enamored at my own verbosity.

Have a Happy New Year!