I Was Just Thinking NO NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS!
	JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2005

by Don Huntington, Editor In Chief

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. (Mark Twain)

Years ago my Aunt Iris posed a riddle for me, “We have two dogs fighting inside of us, a black dog and a white dog. Which dog wins the fight?” The answer turned out to be “The one you feed.”

The quality of my inner life is determined, to a considerable extent, by forces of good and evil that I strengthen or starve by things that I habitually do, think, and meditate upon every day. I create or destroy my life by the processes of my habits. I’ve come to the conclusion that habit is the most powerful natural force in my life — more powerful than the effects of my screwed-up heredity and more potent than the pressures of daily circumstances.

Building up my character, therefore, basically consists of replacing bad habits that diminish me with good habits that build me up.

Getting rid of destructive habits while at the same time forming positive ones is a terribly difficult task, of course. Most of the time my habits work against my effectiveness as a human being. My wife can attest that I am a naturally slothful, undisciplined kind of individual.

My big problem is that my bad habits develop with little or no effort on my part, whereas developing any good habit requires a great deal of energy and continual reinforcement. The Roman philosopher, Seneca, wrote:

It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.

I can agree with Seneca on the basis of my own personal experience, which is why my New Years Resolutions always fail; I lack sufficient energy to change the course of my life in the fundamental ways that making good habits demands.

I’m thankful, however, that I can meld my awareness of the power of habit to my knowledge of the power of these confirmed self-destructive tendencies and, by the influence and the prompting of Heaven, I can begin developing good habits to overcome the evil ones in my life.

Developing good habits isn’t an overnight process as Mark Twain pointed out in the quote at the beginning of this article. I have to coax my habits “downstairs, a step at a time” just as he did. But what a great process this has been! It has undergone many reverses, for sure, but the progress has been real.

So I’m done with New Year’s Resolutions. Once a year is far too infrequent a cadence for setting rhythms and resonances that could grow powerful enough to actually change the habitual ways in which I think and behave.

I must set the beat again each day. I have to resolve every morning to begin again to perform the deeds I should do, to meditate on the thoughts that I should occupy my mind, and to become again the man that Heaven, other people, and my family need for me to be.

I’m so grateful that for the past few years my inner weather has begun to clear up. A principle of grace has invaded my life and has charged me with a power sufficient to make fundamental changes in the ways I habitually live — in the thoughts I routinely think and in the things I consistently do.

I’m grateful that the normal course of my life and my thinking is becoming more positive. My life is regularly becoming a happier place to live, constantly more full of grace.

No statement more accurately states the goals that I might aspire to this year than the final stanza of one of ee cumings poems:

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence (welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

During the year ahead I intend to daily take the internal and external steps that will enable me actually to lift my spirit to Heaven, to stand erect before Him, and to welcome proudly the light and the darkness that will become part of my life in 2005.

I’m regularly feeding “the white dog” with good stuff these days. I’ve learned where the black dog food is and I’m starving that mutt.