Making A Change

More on New Year resolutions.

Look around you; most likely everyone around you has some sort of New Year’s resolution to make. Everyone…. even the best of the best among us have something in their lives that they want to improve.

It’s like we all have this deep rooted notion that we’re always not as good as we’re meant to be; that we’re all somehow falling short of some golden standard that’s forever out of reach. We’re always screwing up; making the wrong moves, saying the wrong words, doing the wrong things. When we’re really honest with ourselves, we usually fall short of the standard we set for ourselves. Nobody’s perfect.

It’s some sort of in-built flaw in our humanly design…..

It’s either we’re a species of perfectionist of impossible standards, or we’re a bunch of losers with abhorrent achievement rates.

Whichever it is, I do believe that the feelings of inadequacy and imperfection are part and parcel of this world. We live in a broken and flawed world that needs fixing. We all acknowledge that one way or another on many different levels.

Personally, we make New Year resolutions, set personal goals, and embark on quest to improve ourselves. As members of society, we volunteer, donate to charities and stay productive. As a group, we form pressure groups, lobbyist, NGO, charity movements, labour laws law advocates. As a people, we try to do something about our earth and our environment; recycling movements, reducing green house effects, green technology. We actually know that there are a lot of things wrong in this world. And at all these levels of human existence, what we’re really trying to do is fix it.

The Times magazine once invited a bunch of eminent authors to write in an essay on what they thought was wrong with the world today. Here’s the famed English author G.K. Chesterton’s essay, IN FULL…

Dear Sirs,


I am.


Sincerely yours,
G. K. Chesterton

We think we’re trying to fix the world. But at the heart of it all, what we are all really trying to fix is ourselves.

WE are the problem. Everything kind of fixing that we do in life is actually an act of cleaning up the mess that we made in the first place.

I used to think that New Year resolutions were a silly thing. Like I said, a person doesn’t really need to wait till the New Year before making a resolution. But I guess wanting to turn a new leaf, or make a new start in the right direction should never be belittled, but encouraged. If fact, making resolutions only once a year many not be often enough.

Many of us have at one point or another, thought about wanting to change the world, like in Michael Jackson’s song “heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the entire human race”. But very quickly, we realize that is almost an impossible task. No one man can change the world; tainted, corrupt and broken as it is.… certainly not a person as ordinary as you and me. Greater men have tried and failed. Changing the world is reserved for extraordinary people, with extraordinary hearts and mind. People like Nelson Mandela, or Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King

But let me put this to you; we CAN change the world. We CAN make a difference. And it all starts with that simple New Year’s resolution that we made at the stroke of midnight. We can’t save lives, rouse rallies or start revolutions, but we can strive to become a person, and encourage our fellow man to do the same. And when enough of us do this, when enough people focus on trying to fix themselves and not other people, many of the problems of this world will also fix themselves. They fix themselves because the one causing them – us – have been fixed.

So whatever your new year’s resolution is this year… try to keep it. You may not believe that something as trivial as losing weight, doing better at work, or volunteering more often can actually change the world… but I think if it’s something that’s going to make you a better person, and you remember to keep your heart in the right place… it can, and it will.

Helen Keller, the great advocate of women’s suffrage, workers rights and disable people once wrote this


"I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble."

And mind you, Helen Keller herself was blind, deaf and mute. If she can say and believe those words, so can we.

So Happy New Year everyone and good luck with those resolutions.