It’s that time of the year again.  Time to reconsider your list of resolutions of how to improve your life. What’s different about this year is that we are on the verge of a decade change, a chance for a fresh approach, if ever there was one.

Without a doubt, the Great Recession was a heckuva way to finish a decade.  And, if the saying that we reap what we sow holds true, it’d be interesting to take a moment to reflect on where our heads were 10 years ago.  On the cusp of the Millenium, as I recall, all we were worried about was Y2k and whether or not our computers would crash or our alarm clocks would go off when we woke up on New Year’s Day.  Our main goal was seemingly to make sure our lives just kept humming along, without losing all of our systems.  Not the most long-term or visionary of goals. Quickly assured that everything was intact as of 12:01am Jan 1, 2000, the years that followed were characterized by the continued Pursuit of More... more wealth, status, celebrity, possessions, information and busy-ness—which spun to a frenzied state of chaos and ended in the Great Recession, a crushing collapse under the weight of all of our excesses.

For all of the suffering, the Great Recession has brought some great lessons too. For one, it’s probably wise to have a longer term goal in mind at the beginning of a decade. Two, in the face of losing everything, we learned what really matters to us.....