If you haven’t yet made any New Year’s resolutions, my best advice is that you not make any. This avoids any possibility of failure and the guilty conscience that leads to lack of sleep, overeating and needless apologies to people you feel you have let down.
Don’t tell anyone if you do, in spite of my warning. That way, if you fall short on those promises to yourself, nobody will know about them or chide you for failure to follow through. If you must confide in someone, be less than positive. Rather than promising to break a bad habit, tell them only that you resolve to try. Self-incrimination has little effect on people who make resolutions and then break them. It does nothing to increase their success rate on future occasions.
Never, ever make lofty, grandiose resolutions that you will not be able to live up to. Ending world hunger, finding a cure for cancer, paying all the bills on time, leaving the bathroom as clean as you found it are just a few of the things that you will find impossible to deliver, so don’t make rash promises. Play it safe and add “if I’m lucky” or “I’ll try to” and let it go at that.
Don’t base your resolutions on what other people consider to be your faults. You can’t stop snoring just because it annoys your bed partner. Don’t give up chocolate just because somebody else thinks you should. Chocolate is Nature’s tranquilizer and is a lot safer, cheaper and, in most instances, more pleasant than pharmaceuticals (prescribed or otherwise.) Instead of resolving to stop smoking, drinking or continuing other harmful vices, resolve to seek professional help – that way you have a much better chance of success.
Enough with the Don’ts, here are some Do’s that will benefit yourself and the people around you. They involve five essentials for happiness; Love, learn, share, play and create. If you promise yourself to include each of them, as often as possible, into each day of your life, you will make yourself, your friends and family, even people you may never meet, happier, too.
Love your family, your neighbor, your job, yourself – as much as possible. There are things about them all that you can admire and be thankful for. Ideally, if we were all perfect, we would all be alike and that would be excessively boring. Even our faults help to make us unique, so try to understand the negative aspects of people and situations and focus on the good. The ability to forgive is a necessary part of love.
Learn about unfamiliar things rather than dismissing them as unworthy. Change is what has brought us from slime to human and will continue to the end of time. None of us is a finished product. Each challenge, person, pleasure, and disappointment we encounter has something new for us. Every bit of information we accept influences the rest of our knowledge and changes our reality.
Share knowledge, joy, sorrow, wealth, beliefs, food, concerns and time with other people. We were never meant to exist alone. There have always been advantages in being part of a family, culture, organization, work force, or committee. We accomplish more when we have shared goals, causes, and problems. And nobody wants to celebrate anything alone.
Play whenever possible. Know the difference between sports and business; war and games; ambition and fantasy. Play is an end in itself, never meant to achieve a goal like physical fitness or winning prizes; it should leave us feeling happy and friendly, neither gloating nor resentful. If you’ve forgotten how to play, watch a roomful of three-year-olds, then go take a ride on a merry-go-round.
Create things both big and small, important and silly. Leave behind something that would never exist if it not for you. It is human nature to create, be it a poem, bridge, tool, painting, recipe, toy or philosophy. Each of us has inherited something of value from the world and we should leave something worthy for the benefit of those who follow. Do it.