What Will You Do With Your Brand New Year?

Yes, indeed. It is the dawn of another year. Something about January, maybe the cold temps, maybe the short days, makes me introspective. I wonder about what the coming twelve months will bring, what changes they'll create in my life and the lives of those close to me.

One thing I'm abundantly clear on is we make our own fortunes, for good or for ill. Attitude has ever so much to do with that. There are a few things I'm letting go of this year--for good I hope. How does one do that, you might ask. Well, for starters, when I fiind myself dwelling on something I have no power to alter, I make an effort to redirect my thoughts. It sounds too easy to be truly effective, but I force myself to focus on something else. It may not work in the first few minutes, but eventually I'm able to clear my mind.

Writing is a great panacea. It gives me an alternate universe to lose myself in. Each of you can certainly find things that sing to you, that soothe your mind and feed your soul. Being outside also works wonders. And yeah, I understand not everyone lives in an outdoor wonderland, but even when I lived in the Sacramento Valley, I found out of the way places to let nature soak into my brain. We all need a break from elecctronics, so you might leave the phone home. If that suggestion got your dander up, take a good, hard look at your attachment to electronics. It really is okay to be unavailable for an hour--unless you're an MD on call. Your friends can wait. If they write you off because they don't hear back from you instantly, they're not as good a friend as you thought they were.

Perhaps I'm an old fogy, but I worry about my attachment to my iPhone. It actually feels good to take breaks from it every day. When I grew up, all we had were landlines. No answering machines, either. Imagine that. Wonder how we survived? While I'm on that track, work got more difficult in the computer age, mostly because of having to be instantly available 24/7. Vacations have gone the way of the cell phone. The only way I was able to get away was in the backcountry. Maybe it speaks to my incompetence as an administrator, but things never fell apart if people couldn't talk to me or text me for a week or ten days.

What are your resolutions for 2013? Is there one thing you want to change? This is a pretty anonymous forum. What is it? I'd like to know.