At the beginning of 1993, MPR’s Lawrence Sutin shares his new year’s resolutions, with five resolutions in no order of importance whatsoever.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) Happy New Year, as the calendar flips to the fourth year of the decade of the 90s. I get that irresistible annual urge to make resolutions that I may not keep or even remember still there's something about that New Year's urge to refocus oneself that is useful even when one falls woefully short of ones goals. If nothing else. It lends a heightened drama to those opening days of January above and beyond the fear that you'll write the wrong year on your checks all month long. So here are my five resolutions in no order of Importance whatsoever. Number one I will give the people who matter to me small gifts whenever I feel like it. I will not wait for birthdays and holidays and I will not pinch pennies in the guise of fiscal maturity. When I see that special something that someone I know should definitely have by God they will have it. I'm not talking extravagance here, or maybe I am either way. I'm going to stop making excuses to myself for not being generous to my family and friends number two. I will spend Less and less time comparing myself to other people this applies across the board from Little chores to life Ambitions. Let's take just one example bagging groceries. I shop at a supermarket where you bag your own now, I tend to be a somewhat slow bagger because I want to use as few bags as possible and to avoid crushing the bread and breaking the eggs. I can't help but notice as I bag that some other people seem to go a lot faster those people make me feel clumsy other people bag even slower than I do and clog up the checkout lines these people give me a cheap sense of superiority. So from now on I'm going to bag as best. I can and strike conversations with my fellow Shoppers instead of timing them and so on with everything I do every day number three, I will fight fight fight against the dying of the light and get out and dance. It is so easy when you are over 40 as I am to give up the joy of going out to bars and dancing to blues music until the one am closing after All going to bed and curling up under the covers with a good book is a joy unto itself and there's that weariness of the bones that sets in between 9 and 10 p.m. And that seems to say nightlife is for college kids and horny singles, but the blues is a blessed music for all ages and in blues bars young and old married and single rich and poor black and white alike are dancing A Small Miracle in our classified and stratified America and to be out on the floor swaying to the living beat of a heart. Twerking band is a high for body and mind that no aerobic. StairMaster can match number four. I will stop lying so much some of the lies I can live with the ones that withhold useless and uninvited negative input into the lives of others. But from now on if people do ask me what I think I'm going to try harder to tell them instead of ladling out what I suspect. They want to hear this resolution seems to suggest that I'm going to tell a whole lot of people off not true. Anger is as futile as lying. I just want to provide on a consistent basis a sharper picture of who I really am so that people with whom I have a real connection can approach more confidently as it is with all the pleasant little lies. I tell I encourage people with whom I have little in common to step up and as the saying goes make conversation I've made too much and I have no one but my lying self to blame Fifth and last I will pay even closer attention to the Markable fact that reality is the product of one's own Consciousness Milton wrote that the mind creates its own heavens and hell's Buddhist speak of the interdependence of all conditional phenomena Quantum theorists point to the nonlocalized interplay of the entire universe on a less theoretical basis everyone who lives life attentively knows that the way we think affects the way life goes. This doesn't mean that positive thinking makes everything right? That is the Of the self-help quacks and a stream that is all the more cheap and cruel because it is partially true. The part that is emitted is the need to understand that reality. However linked to Consciousness is inimical to the grasping ego reality is as it were its own reward. So to say that I'll pay attention to this is to promise that I'll care about all of us. I'll try Happy New Year.