One of the services any good blogger should be ready to perform for readers is help out with New Year’s Resolutions. This might seem a little late to some of you, but the people who get their Christmas shopping done by Halloween are not exactly my core audience.
And, anyway, by this time of the year, you may be reconsidering some of those hopeful rules you made for yourself in December. You know the type: you’re definitely going to get out and make use of that gym membership you won in the office raffle.
Or you’re really going to stick to your budget (in spite of the after-Christmas sales or the great early prices of Valentine’s Day chocolates.)
You’re going to pick up new skills in 2024. You’re going to try new things.
You’re going to share your natural skills, those talents you’ve been responsibly, er, unnecessarily modest about all these years, with a larger audience.
After all, sharing is a natural adjunct to any good resolution, so you will be sure to SHARE your skills and attributes.
And, in doing so, make a real effort to meet new people, make new friends, enlarge your circle of acquaintances.
But at the same time, you’re going to keep your mind on what you’re doing, improve your attention to work, or pick up all those projects you were working on when you got distracted by something more interesting. You will do all these things in 2024, and become such a shining example of hard work and virtue that you will no longer need any resolutions as of January 1, 2025. Of course you are. I do not doubt any of this (thank goodness I don’t read these blogs live on some video site.) But, based on what I have read some of you posting on the Interwebs, may I suggest a few extra ones you may not have thought of.
Worry a little less. I don’t say stop worrying; people would worry about you. But be a little choosier about it. If you worry that Cyndi Celebrity has broken off with Harold Has-Been to take up with Norman Now, you will use up the strength you need to worry about bigger things, like whether your insurance will cover your motorized scooter on icy pavements.
Take things as you find them and be happy you found them in the first place. Not perfect? Well, better luck next time.
Don’t sulk about every little thing that offends you. Do other people complain about every little thing you do? Well, of course they do, this is the Interwebs. But look them over and rethink whether YOU really want to be just like them.
Getting upset about life’s tiny accidents doesn’t make these annoyances any better, after all.
Laugh more, even (or especially) when the joke is on you, and maybe these little things will go away. (Our ancestors, more than a hundred years ago, who were nutso on positive thinking and motivational phrases, had one I was shocked to find in college yearbooks of the Edwardian era: “Smile every day, and laugh out loud once in a while just for the hell of it.”)
Check once in a while and see if you are really enjoying life. (Of course, if you enjoy posting dark, gloomy attacks on the Interwebs, well…very well.)
And if it SHOULD accidentally happen that your 2024 resolutions aren’t perfectly followed, either the ones you made or the ones I have just made for you, remember it’s an imperfect world. It probably wasn’t REALLY your fault. And (with luck) there’s always 2025.
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