Every new year we are challenged to conger up resolutions aimed at making us stretch, grow, realize some longed for attribute or achieve some sought after goal.

Certainly, a new year sets the stage for reviewing life, examining values and charting new courses. But, of the estimated 100 million resolutions Americans often hastily make on New Year’s eve, statistics show that 80% of them don’t make it to the end of January.

Thus we might be tempted to follow English novelist Fanny Burney’s lead, “Far from having taken any positive step, I have not yet even formed any resolution.”

On the other hand, maybe our resolutions aren’t kept because we don’t arrive at them knowing what we really want.  What would truly make us happy.

Most of us can easily answer questions like – what new skills would I like to learn in the coming year? What bad habits would I like to eliminate? What would I most like to accomplish? What new place would I like to visit? But, things get a little murkier when we attempt to answer the question – what can I do in the coming year that will make me happy? Meaning, what do I really want out of life? Questions not so easily answered.

If we’re one of the many who has a hard time pinpointing our precise wants in life, we can begin to make choices in favor of the things we enjoy. We remove things that irritate us and add to our schedules ordinary pleasures that will refresh our days and show good self-respect. We dig to find out what excites or stretches us thus adding greater satisfaction to each day. We recognize that happiness is not only about earning, achieving, advancing.  That is often comes from life balance which includes multiple interests and plenty of planned good times.

In short, maybe the most worthwhile challenge is to determine what our own particular ‘happy’ is. Further,  if we spend the entire year determining what means a lot to us, what we’d really like to be doing, what really rings our chimes, it will be a year well-spent.

Perhaps we can all say “Happy New Year of No Resolutions” to that!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013 at 11:50 am and is filed under Miracles, Miracles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.