Happy New Year

The following is an exerpt from my journal of yesterday outlining goals for the new year. There is a lot of thinking and planning and more doing left on all of the goals that I wrote down but this is a start. Anyway, here it is.

New Years Day and Eve together make up one of my favorite holidays. If Christmas celebrates the coming of Christ, and Easter his death and resurrection, then for me New Years celebrates the fact that we can repent. What hope there is in repentance! What hope there is in the fact that we need not be bound by our failings of yesteryear. What excitement there is behind the acquisition of new habits and ways of life.

I hunger to make worthy resolutions and then to have life blessed by them. What I have found so far is that I need a trial process or a filtering process on my resolutions. Living by some of them improves our quality of life. Living by others sounds good but ends up not leading to a true improvement. And I'm not sure that I will know in advance what is true. The resolution to write in my journal has been one of the neatest ones so far.

So in a way the concept of a resolution isn't the right one for what I have found to work best. Perhaps the concept of proposals is a better one. Regardless, I hunger to see my life become better than it is right now. Here is not an official list but, at least for now, a brainstorming list:

• Time myself regularly in the mile and progress in running times over the course of the year

• Take charge of education for our children and see that they begin to get a great one

• Court Gina as though I will ask her to marry me at the end of the year. Then actually ask her.

• Gain an intuitive and mathematical understanding of general relativity.

• Become a salesman in the best sense of the word

• Become a teacher in the best sense of the word (is this the same as the previous one?)

• Earn enough money to create a 10 thousand dollar buffer and any reserves we need for known expenditures and dry months

• Go camping with the family 5 times

• Learn to be a real friend and allow myself to take pleasure in the association of others.

• Write at least 8 academic papers and submit at least 7 of them for publication

• Live each day as if the day is a gift and will be gone forever by night.

As I write these I love them. All of them need to be elaborated and thought out quite a bit. All of them can be considered macroscopic goals and their accomplishment will require some real planning and doing. So as a last goal I suppose I ought to include time to think about their accomplishment. At the same time they are all long sentences. It would be wise to come up with a short mental representation for each goal so that I can quickly remind myself of each of them. The exact choice of that representation will be quite important.

I showed the goals to Gina and she approved. And I like them. They are therefor no longer just a brainstorming list but a set of guidelines to be used as tools to help me live an excellent year this year. Happy New Year!