Yesterday I made my resolutions for 2010. I even came up with a theme for the year: “Start over again in 2010.” As I looked at the daunting list it occurred to me that these are resolutions for the entire year, not just January. If I start them all at once, I am apt to fail. It’s hard to make changes; old habits are hard to break; new habits take time to form. I took my list of resolutions and wrote a different month next to each one. Now I have only one to concentrate on in January, and a good hope of success. In February I will tackle the next one, once I have had a month to form the new patterns of the first, and so on. Of course, having written them all down they are all in my mind and if I start some early, as I am bound to do, I’m not going to stop just because their month has not arrived. But if I find that I am trying to do too many at once, I’ll look back at my list with assigned months and go back to working on the most important one at that time.

This has given me new hope that this year I will succeed in the making the changes I have resolved to make. Now I have to decide if this year is “Twenty Ten” or “Two Thousand Ten.”