New Year’s Resolutions

by Madeleine Richey

The Holiday season just ended, family and friends have gone home, you’ve returned from your travels, and your pants still don’t fit quite right because you just had to eat that third serving of turkey. Happy New Year!!!

After the Christmas season the last thing we want to do is face ourselves. For most of us this probably means looking in the mirror, or back on the days that have just gone by. We don’t like to see the fat on our bodies, the breakouts, the awkwardness, and we don’t like to look back and see all the times we failed to be kind, stayed out of the party because we were too shy, or found that we have shortcomings in all manner of things: schoolwork, relationships, art, or music. But looking at ourselves is an important part in making a New Year’s Resolution. Whether we like it or not, if we want to make ourselves better we first have to identify a problem, no matter how hard we’ve worked to ignore it in the first place.

This process starts by asking ourselves if we are happy with who we are, and if we want to be better next year. Who do you want to be a year from now and how are they different from who you are today?

Everyone is welcome to make their resolution in whatever way they like: it can be big or little, hard or easy, noticeable, or something only you will see. It’s an opportunity to make yourself a better person and start fresh with a new year.

That being said, I think I might have found the wrong way to go about making a New Year’s Resolution. An acquaintance of mine, a year or so back, instead of making a New Year’s Resolution, decided that he was going to make a list of things he wanted to own by the end of the year, most of them expensive electronics and high tech gadgets that we all want, but don’t necessarily get. Not to say that he is a bad person or that it is wrong for someone to want all the latest technology, but I think that he missed the point of a New Year’s Resolution. The point is to make yourself better, not to add more gadgets to your collection.

If your resolution will make you a better person, it fits the bill, and if you keep it, congratulations. One study (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year’s_resolution –I must admit that for this article, I did use Wikipedia) showed that only about 12 percent succeed. But that is no reason to keep from trying. Even if you don’t complete the entire goal, each small change you make for the better makes a big difference in the long run.

Happy New Year!

Madeleine, 16, says: I want to help people and I want to tell stories, especially the stories of people who don’t have a voice of their own.”

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