I'm not going to mock politicians this year.
For one whole year, I'm going to withhold my contempt, hang back on the snide remarks, and back off from cynically pointing and laughing at them.
Except for a few exceptions.
For instance, I simply cannot ignore them when they do things that are so dumb or say things that are so unmitigatingly foolish that it is simply too convenient for me to pass up the opportunity for a chuckle.
And Stephen Harper.
I'm not one to draft a formal list of New Year's Resolutions, per se.
However, I do find this a convenient time of year to push myself a bit towards making a few changes that I perceive might help to improve my lifestyle, or maybe even make me a slightly better person - for those who might be keeping score.
One of the improvements that I usually start planning well before Christmas each year is a personal one: a pledge to attempt a reduction of intake of sweets and other foods with too many calories and too little nutritional value- conveniently beginning immediately with the start of the new year.
That conveniently allows me to pig out all the way to Christmas and throughout the run-up to New Year's celebrations, knowing that all the guilt associated with my poor eating habits through the season can be conveniently dealt with all in one lump, only after I conveniently realize that I have kept eating chocolate, cookies, and too much stuffing long after my New Year's Day deadline.
Incidentally, I generally find it convenient to make that deleterious dietary realization several weeks into January. As "time heals all wounds," after all, I find it convenient to allow a considerable amount of time to help soften the blow that the guilt deals, even before I feel it, so that I conveniently miss the sudden, deepest, and most emotionally painful early part of the guilt process.
Not only is this a convenient "resolution," as some might call it, but it gets more convenient every year, as it conveniently tends to create a greater need for itself every time.
Other than that, I've constructed the following poem to help get me from one day to the next:
Let it be said, on the day that I'm dead,
That the world is a better place:
Not for my leaving, And not for your grieving,
But for the way my time altered this space.
Let it be said, on the day that
I'm dead, That my good deeds have
outdone my harm. I find the real challenge Is tipping the balance From the nasty side onto the charm.
For we all fall to lark and slip short of the mark,
And our journey's sometimes hard to tread,
But however we fail, All it takes to prevail Is a bottom line out of the red.
So let it be said, on the day that I'm dead,
That the world is a better place:
Not for my dying, And not for your crying,
But for one smile that I put on one face.
If that all seems a little too easy, too convenient, then consider this: if everyone left the world just one tiny bit better- that would be seven billion tiny bits of goodness.
My hope is that you find 2012 your best year, if only by a tiny bit, if only by one smile.
Bob Groeneveld is the editor of the Langley Advance.
