A New Year's Resolution

I've never been one for making New Year's resolutions.  It's a good thing, because I wouldn't get past day one without breaking one.  Well, my friend Renee Valdivia has a great idea, which she shared on Facebook, so I don't think she'd mind if I shared it with you.  I'm giving her all the credit for this wonderful idea.

Get a jelly jar and keep it in the kitchen, bedroom or bathroom.  Every time something good happens this year, take a little piece of paper and write it and put it in the jar.  At the end of the year you will have a jar filled with great things that happened to you in 2016.  I already have my jar, and have written my first great thing today, on January 1.  I walked for 45 minutes with Mirme, played pickleball for over an hour, and went in the pool with Ron, to help him exercise.  That to me is a GREAT way to start the year.

I did something similar with a jelly jar when Ron was at Taft.  I filled a jar with jelly beans, the exact number representing the number of days he would be gone.  Every morning I removed one jelly bean (of course I ate the jelly bean), and as the weeks rolled by, it was a wonderful reminder of how fast or slow time goes.  The only problem was that my son David came down to visit one day, and dug into the jelly bean jar.  I asked him how many jelly beans he'd eaten and of course he didn't know, but it screwed up my count.  I put a few jelly beans back in the jar, and when jar was empty, Ron was home.

Putting a message in a jar when something great happens in your life will be a constant reminder to me of how many great things really do happen.  Even though I have a lot of difficult things to deal with right now, there's still a lot I appreciate, and I'm grateful for that.  Happy New Year everyone.