Resolution for realz

Have you ever found yourself standing next to a friend or loved one either just before or just after that great big ball in New York makes its way down to the ground? They are going on and on about how this year is going to be their year and making resolution after resolution. Chances are you only listen with half an ear.

Its okay it happens to almost all of us. Or maybe you are the one making the endless streams of commitments. How come so few of us take it seriously?

After all a resolution is supposed to be something that you resolve to do. You are making a statement about how your life is going to change for the better. You are spelling out what needs to occur in order to have a better life and making a promise to make it happen.

No one time is really better than any other to make positive change in your life. It can happen whenever we choose to make it happen. As long as we are alive there really is no beginning and no ending. But, traditionally, it is done at New Year's because the ringing in of the new year is a symbolic beginning. It is easy for us to section off in our mind all of the things that happened before the new year from those things that happen afterwards.

We say that the things that happened before are part of our old life and the things that happen after are part of the new one. At the very beginning of the year we haven't done any of the things that we "aren't supposed to". So , it is easy to say that we won't do them. Or that we will do more of what we should.

But it seems like for most of us this tradition is just something we pay lip service to and do kind of on autopilot. It is as if our conscience (or the part of us that knows what we need to do in order to get the things we really want) is allowed to speak for a brief time at the beginning of the year and then we ignore it for the rest of the year.

Why do we do that? We take one of the best tools that we could ever hope to have for making improvements to our lives and we either ignore it entirely, or we share with friends and family exactly what we need and then proceed to follow the precise course we've been on that is leading us nowhere.

I challenge you to make a different choice.

I challenge you to either consciously accept that you are going to keep on having exactly the same sucky things that you have in your life right now, or decide once and for all that you are going to change things for good.

But, please, for the love of all that is sacred, stop lying to your friends and family about the things that you say you are going to do, when everyone involved knows you have no intention of actually following through.

When a person is truly committed to something, others can hear the conviction in their voice, see their posture and facial expressions and know beyond a shadow of a doubt that whatever it is that person says is going to happen. When was the last time someone someone got any of those things out of your New Year's resolutions?

If your life would be made better by losing twenty pounds, lose twenty pounds. If it would be made better by a new relationship, get a new relationship. If your quality of life would be improved by not smoking, quit smoking.

If you are actually going to make your life better in some way, feel free to make a commitment and share it with others as one of your New Year's resolutions. It is okay if you need assistance in keeping the resolution, but at least be willing to do the work.

A family trip pt1

We went up to Malabar, Florida to visit family for New Year's. With it having been more than ten years since the last visit, it was definitely long overdue. It used to be a trip that got made every year when I was younger.

Then awhile back there were some issues between my mom, myself and one of my brothers that never really got resolved. It's water under the bridge now, but for quite a long period of time, I was upset about it and really didn't want to have anything to do with my brother.

Between that and the passing on of my great-grandparents I just couldn't make myself be part of our annual gatherings.

Though outwardly, not much has changed, I am a much different person than I was ten years ago. Many of the things that I did then, I would do differently now and would get much different results.
Some of the relationships I had with family in the past could certainly do with some improvement.

Also, now, I have more immediate family of my own. And it is important to me that they have the opportunity to form strong familial bonds, just as I would like to strengthen and regain some of the ones that I had before and grow new ones.

Between children, parents, grandparents and great grandparents, there were four generations of our family represented. Not everyone was there due to some that could not make it and some that chose not to, but it was the majority of the people that I have come to accept as our family.

When I was just a few years old I used to hang out in the kitchen with my great grandmother and "help" her cook. And I used to love watching my great grandfather's home movies. His voice was always the perfect narration for whatever happened to be going on at the time.

My great grandfather's birthday was New Years and mine is on Christmas. We always used to have a small celebration for the two birthdays when the family would gather. I could care less about mine. But I really enjoyed celebrating his. It was when he really started to get sick that I lost interest in the family gatherings. I just didn't want to believe that one day they would be gone.

Seeing a picture of the two of them on my grandmother's refrigerator almost brought me to tears. Even now I'm tearing up while writing this. I never realized how much I miss them.

Then it occurred to me that they were directly responsible for all of the people who are still here that were gathered together as family. And I had to smile at that, because although they were all very different some soft and gentle, some rough around the edges and others at varying stages in between, they were all good people.

There were more than a dozen of us, so quarters were a little cramped, but not unpleasantly so. It was fun and interesting learning and observing people's habits and points of view. Before, I was one of the members of the  younger generation of the family.  I remember the ideas, thoughts and even prejudices of the older generation that would get shared in idle conversation. Some of them are people whose names and face I have forgotten.

But, it was fascinating to see the impact that their beliefs had on the middle and younger generations. How some things were accepted and complied with and others were shaken off through either rejection or rebellion, but each thing still made an impact.