Contributing writer
By the time this column hits the stands it will be Jan. 4. How many of you who made New Year’s resolutions haven’t broken them yet? It seems to me that people pick things like losing weight, being more financially responsible, spending more time with a spouse, or growing in their relationship with God.
I’ve never made a New Year’s resolution; I find the whole process of picking out a resolution and then trying to maintain it to be too much work.
Last week there was a section in the Record dedicated to what Marion should resolve to do in 2012. There were some good ideas in there. I think as a town we could resolve to do a lot of great things that will make this a better place.
I might be too much of a simpleton, but I think that the resolutions will work better if they are a grassroots effort. That is to say, that if we each resolve to make our homes and our blocks a better place each day than they were the day before, we will begin to see a community in transformation.
We can sit around and wait for the City Council or the County Commission to make our lives better, but based on recent history, we might not be happy with the amount of time it takes. No offense to those two groups, but I think it has been successfully proven that the time spent waiting for any elected officials to make life better is time that could be better used actually improving our lives.
So what if instead of making resolutions on Jan, 1 that many of us end up breaking on Jan. 2, why not resolve that we will make our personal lives and for those of us with families, our family lives, better today than they were the day before.
Let us, as members of what I think is a really good community, set out in the rest of 2012 to improve who we are each day so that when 2012 comes to a close, we will be significantly better than we are today.