Positively Looking Forward to Resolution

Approaching each new year as an opportunity to somehow start over, or tackle some aspects of our lives with a mentally clean slate can be a positive experience if you don't set yourself up for failure. Don't set unrealistic expectations.

If you can visualize a change in your life, explore that visualization and devote positive thoughts and energy toward it on a regular basis. Focus on positive thoughts and positive consequences, and the many aspects your life that will be improved when you make steps in a direction toward your goal. Remember life is a journey, not a destination.

Don't be shy about rewarding yourself for your accomplishments, or even for little steps toward your goal--but find a way to reward yourself in a way that doesn't undo your progress. Don't substitute one bad behaviour for another.

I've had a Baby Boomers number of years experience in listing resolutions, and having them fall to the side within months, weeks, days--even hours. There were the number of pounds to be shed, an exercise routine to be established, and the giving up of indulging in cigarettes and binging on alcohol. Over the years I've been fatter and thinner.

I've seen a friend give up drinking, to pick up a cocaine nose habit, then fall to an end that hasn't hit yet from a crack pipe-walking around drooling and wthout pants--honestly like a baby, unable to speak. I regularly thank God that didn't happen to me. There are lots of kinds of living death. I haven't seen him for two years, and I don't want to.

As a matter of course I support those that need to make a drastic change because of an excess of alcohol or some kind of street or prescription drug. Life is a medical balance for lots of people wheather they prefer it or not. Like me, for example: I'm bipolar. I'm stable of late. Currently I take 7 pills every day.

I try to maintain between what my psychiatrist wants to try me on, and my need to not have so many side effects that I can't think and function. This isn't a situation that many people face, or maybe they do. But we never really know what or where in the world people are coming from--perhaps in some Internet virtual reality, or economically, or romantically where they are "at", do we?

I resolve to try to not come down hard on others, because I really don't know what they are going through. I'm goingto try to remember that before I get short with someone. Faces that smile are more beautiful. Perhaps we could all stand to practice smiles and eye contact, formerly considered just common courtesy, at doorways--unless that turns weird. I ponder between living in my own world in my own path, and getting involved with individuals I don't know. The way life is in the big city as 2011 begins, you don't know if the person in the vehicle next to you is almost ready to blow.