What Makes New Year’s Resolutions Really Work?
Benjamin Franklin once said, “Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.” It sounds like the key to making New Year’s Resolutions really work is putting your words into action, practice, working at them, striving for them. What a good use of time.
Imagine if you had a boss, parent, spouse whose attitude was he didn’t want to try and fix his annoying habits. Does this make a person easy with which to have a relationship? The greatest gift we can give others and ourselves is to be better people. In order to do this successfully, we need tools to help.
Mary Baker Eddy wrote this inspiration that I have found helpful in my life, “Self-ignorance, self-will, self-righteousness, lust, covetousness, envy, revenge, are foes to grace, peace, and progress; they must be met manfully and overcome, or they will uproot all happiness. Be of good cheer; the warfare with one’s self is grand; it gives one plenty of employment, and the divine Principle worketh with you, — and obedience crowns persistent effort with everlasting victory.” It is comforting to know that God gives direction, a standard, and works with us to embrace the effort and the crown. Our job is to be obedient to His guidance and our true selfhood as His creation. Included in that true nature, we have the innate ability to recognize it and all the persistence needed. Isn’t this part of the message of the Christ, the grace of God? Every religion incorporates to some degree this same basis of spiritual self-discovery and tools to identify use and live this wonderful basis of the Creator and creation’s real substance.
I had a friend in high school whose motto was, “This is who I am and I am not going to change.” Anyone can adopt this cop out attitude toward life. One may even think it would make the way in life easier, but what I have observed is that it actually makes life harder. Not only do you not progress as an individual, but also you regress. Why? Because life demands that you improve or past mistakes get repeated and only grow bigger with time. The decisions you make today affect your tomorrows for good or bad and they lead to other decisions. When your decisions are based on what is your highest sense of right at the time, based on Principle, this sets your life on a path for greater peace and less indecisiveness and problems. Without Principle, one drifts all over the place in actions and decisions. Keep in mind, there is no room for self-righteousness or rigid thinking included in our understanding and practice of Principle.
Another example on a global scale, I read a Newsweek/Washington Post article (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/eboo_patel/2008/12/same_old_middle_east_playbook.html) by Eboo Patel, an interfaith worker in the Israel-Palestine area. He commented that at times like these we cannot keep going back to old thought patterns and repeating the same mistakes. He quoted an age-old proverb, “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” I asked myself, “Am I willing to think differently about the Middle East?” “What are my expectations?” I have seen the effect interfaith experiences have had in my own life and in the lives of others–what a greater understanding for one another brings to relationships and unity. Interfaith activity has been at work in very tangible ways in the Middle East in the form of education and at the grass roots level.
If we want to make our lives better, we don’t start with the lowest model and anchor our behavior there. There is no place for cynicism or hanging onto the past either. This is true in policies of education, business, government or any institution and in every endeavor of life. Have a prosperous New Year filled with fresh ideas and the desire to use them!
Anne Cooling
