This column officially will come out on New Year’s Day. That’s really odd this year, since last week’s edition had the Christmas Day date on it.

Right now, as I write, it’s actually the day before Christmas. As I sit here at my computer, I’m thinking about a variety of things, none of which has anything to do with New Year’s Day.

However, I decided before I started typing to write something about my annual resolutions. Maybe I’ll find my way to stay on track. The first thing I decided to do was to pull up last year’s New Year’s column and see how well I did on my resolutions.

I had actually thought of this as an original idea, until I looked back and realized that I did the same thing last year. How much of what I do is trapped in an endless cycle, repetition after repetition? Secondly, how much do I fail to learn in those repetitions if I don’t even remember that it was a repetition?

So, my goals for 2007 and 2008 were almost the same and only now have some of those hopes been realized.

In 2008, I had written that I hoped to pay off my debts, especially a credit card and the debt from building my building and buying a little car. Based on my predictions of income and other situations, I now believe that will finally happen in early 2009. It might have happened last year, but I used all of the family’s extra money to go visit the “House of Mouse” in Florida after I found those $10 plane tickets on that Greensboro airline that no longer is in business.

This year I’m planning to stay home and use my vacation money to be basically debt free. Well, I still will owe for the house, but that’s something that can’t really be paid off any time soon. Maybe I’ll put some of the extra money I’ll save from paying bills on paying extra on the house payment.

Or maybe it’s time to start a real retirement account with serious contributions every year. When I think about the state of my retirement funds, I usually try to change the topic. After all, if Mickey Mouse becomes president and I win the lottery twice, I might be able to retire by the time I’m 70. Well, maybe it isn’t that bad, but it’s close.

I had also planned to try to ‘get in shape’ and ‘start eating better,’ but I don’t think from looking in the mirror that I’ve met both those goals.

In fact, I think I will go this year—this week—and rejoin the local wellness center.

My problem is that my life isn’t very disciplined. I’ve always been the kind of person who flies by the seat of his pants. I don’t stick to the plan when I make one and I don’t follow the best course of action day in and day out.

The exercise option is another obvious failure. I went to the center in 2006, as I recall, and went regularly for some two or three months before dropping off to only going occasionally. In the end, I didn’t go at all. That’s the way things happen when there’s no discipline, first it happens on schedule, and then it falls off a little and then it stops altogether.

Another of my goals last year was to read the Bible all the way through using my planner that gives the scriptures to read morning and night. So far, in the past two years, I’ve managed to get only through March without getting hopelessly off track. From that point on, I find myself instead just jumping around from book to book aimlessly going through the Testaments. While it’s good either way, there’s a 100 percent likelihood that the book will not be read in its entirety that way, but some places might be read multiple times. It’s not a problem with the book, it’s the reader.

So as I look forward to the coming year, I’m not sure if I should even bother making resolutions. As I said in this column last year at exactly the same time, “But no matter how hard I try, my best-laid plans seem to fall to my penchant for not following my best-laid plans.”

I suppose my ‘all or nothing’ attitude has often led to my undoing on several noble endeavors. Too much or none is not a good philosophy to follow—wisdom brings moderation, not excess.

So why don’t I exercise wisdom, which would lead me to exercise my mind, my body and my spirit, but not my mouth? I’ll bet that’s a question people have been asking themselves as long as there have been resolutions. Maybe resolutions aren’t really something that we’re supposed to do, but a way to try and reprogram our paradigm, or method of operation. Perhaps the resolution isn’t an end unto itself, but rather a vehicle for self-realization wherein the average man can analyze what he likes or doesn’t like about himself.

Looked at in that way, maybe my real problem isn’t that I don’t follow a reading schedule or that I don’t exercise regularly enough, but that I don’t follow through with, or completely finish, the things I’ve started.

That seems to hit the nail right on the head. My real problem isn’t one of planning future actions, but of the resulting inaction. When I look back on all the tasks I’ve undertaken, it’s easy to see that I’ve made great strides in many areas and accomplished many things. However, there are few things that I can point to and say, “It is finished. I couldn’t do another thing. It’s perfected.” Maybe by not finishing, I give myself a built-in excuse for not attaining the desired result, which is, in theory at least, perfection.

Though I’ve always known that anything worth doing is worth finishing and anything worth finishing is worth doing well, that doesn’t mean I live that way. How much knowledge is treated with that very same disregard? How much more could we become if we properly applied the wisdom we’ve already attained? That’s why life’s script often reads too much like either a comedy or a tragedy when it should be a more of a love story like the Bible I haven’t read as well as I should have.

Well, the good thing about it is that we can all continue to improve as long as we continue to live. Now there’s a resolution worthy of a year’s worth of effort.