Challenge your default New Year’s resolution!

New Years, like New Year’s resolutions, come and go. We make great self improvement promises to ourselves and other's, and they are often fleeting and not sustainable. “What if, instead of planning our exercise regimens, we focused our intentions on all that is undesirable in human activity” — wars, poverty, food insecurity, prejudice, isolation, homelessness, discrimination, and just basic cruelty? “Consider Whitman…The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn’t. All it takes is the proper sequence of correct discrete decisions. Decisions are just resolutions with teeth. An editor shared a story from his childhood on his grandparents’ farm in Iowa. The little boy, looking out over acres and acres of corn, asked his grandfather, How are we going to shuck all that corn? His grandfather said one row at a time.”

What can you do to make a better world? Stage a protest? Send a letter to right a wrong? Proffer a friendship? Lend a hand? Offer a word of comfort or inspiration or support or love? Donate money, or most valuable of all, time?

This idea is that selfishness is not the opposite of self improvement, rather it can be the most meaningful and lasting kind…and bless so many.