Resolved

I don't usually make New Year's resolutions; at least not in any specific way. I have been thinking of making a very simple one this year. I want to be happier this year. Believing as I do that I am the only one who can make me happy I have resolved to do a better job of that this year; to give it a higher priority on my list of things to do every day.

I think it is a pretty simple thing to resolve to do. It is undoubtably much harder to actually accomplish but I am going to give it a try. In thinking about how to accomplish this it seems pretty simple. Spend more time doing things that make me happy. This seems simple enough and can be accomplished with just a little forethought and effort. The second task is to spend less time doing things that make me unhappy. Obviously, some of the things I have to do to survive are not things that make me happy but I am convinced that they also don't have to be things that make me unhappy.

I am convinced that many things in this category that have tended to make me unhappy in the past were as much a product of my attitude about being forced to do them as the actions themselves. In other words I can choose to do things willingly and with a good attitude or find myself forced to do them and develop a bad attitude. I am going to try to work at adopting the first approach instead of the second.

In mentally going over my lists of happy and unhappy activities it occurs to me that there are a lot more activities that fall in the middle than those at either extreme. In other words, I seem to spend a lot of time doing activities that I have little passion for one way or another. This seems a bigger contribution to my general outlook than activities at either end of the spectrum because of the percentage of my time it controls. I suspect this is both the easiest problem to attack and the one most likely to make the biggest difference in my general mood because it takes up so much of my time every day.

Resolved…


1) Spend more time doing things that make me happy
2) Spend less time doing things that make me unhappy
3) Spend as little time as possible doing things that I don't care about to begin with.