Happy New Year to you, yours, and anyone else in need of such. As is generally the case, this time of year there is plenty of content flooding the many media outlets regarding how to make 2021 such a glorious year that your face hurts from smiling until 2031. If this is the quest you have set forth in search of in these early hours of a shiny new year, I wish you well.

May your fountain of hope never stop springing eternal as the days turn to weeks, and those weeks roll over to the months to come. Like Ms. Romano, take it one day at a time, because one never knows when their show is going to get canceled. So it goes.

One of my favorite podcasts, The Art of Manliness, joined in on spreading some pointers regarding all this sort of New Year hubbub with its latest episode “Begin the New Year by Reflecting on These 3 Life-Changing Questions”. Despite the name of the podcast, you don’t necessarily need to be a man, manly, or even Art, to get something of use from the content the host, Brett McKay, generates on his podcast and his website.

Spoiler alert for those intending to give the show a listen, the three life-changing questions to ask yourself each day are:

  1. What have I received today?

  2. What have I given today?

  3. In what ways did I make life difficult for others today?

A fairly straight forward way for one to take stock of each day, and the manner in which we moved through it. Your daily answers to these three questions doesn’t have to be anything extraordinary, and as the saying goes, “It’s the little things that count.” For the good and for the bad.

Number three is a particularly fun one to contemplate, and isn’t intended to be an opportunity to brag about the masterful means in which you tortured the lives of others. For you perfectly considerate saintly folks, feel free to make an attempt at making someone else’s life difficult each day so that you have something to write about. I’m sure you’ll manage.

A household bathroom alone provides ample opportunity to make life difficult for those you share that household with. Toilet seats left agape, toilet paper rolls left empty, Febreze left unsprayed, sinks left in various states of nastiness, and so on and so forth.

The intent of these questions is to generate gratitude for the daily good we find ourselves the recipient of, to allow us to mindfully reflect on the authentic personal pride and satisfaction derived from giving what we give, and to create awareness of how our actions (or inactions) impact others.

I’m sure many of you probably engage in this sort of thing, formally or informally, already, but I thought I’d share this with you…just in case you needed something to occupy your time during the new and improved 2021 edition of plague lockdowns. Ha…ha…….ha…