ONE Thing

New Year's Day usually brings about a host of resolutions that we make in order to try to better ourselves. Whether it is to start going back to church, exercise more, eat less fast food, start practicing meditation, get organized, find a better job, go to yoga class, or win the Nobel Peace Prize, we put extreme pressure on ourselves to create an idealized life.

My life has not really been working the way that I want it to for a very long time. The last couple of years have been really rough as I have had personal, health, and financial problems a plenty. As New Year's Eve approached, I thought that I would set aside for quiet contemplation and make a list of resolutions in an attempt to improve my life. Then I decided that the effort would most likely fail. I have a tendency to get overwhelmed by things and a daunting laundry list of the things that I believe that I was doing wrong would result in self-sabotage. Instead of doing this, I decided to embrace the concept of ONE.


Rather than trying to live up to that perfected list, I decided that I was going to limit myself to doing one thing each day to advance my life in some way shape or form. It could be as simple as organizing one drawer, cleaning one room, breathing for one minute, watching one less hour of television, have one less helping of food at dinner, drinking one less soda, and most importantly taking one thing and day at a time.


So, today I did just this. When I woke up, I started looking for that one thing to do today. It turns out that there were lots of moments to do one thing. I did succeed in doing one thing (actually I did more than one thing), but I would say that the one thing that I did that was the most important is that I took time at the end of the day to reflect upon what I had done and where I missed opportunities to do one thing. I look forward to doing the same tomorrow.