Now our virtual lives are screaming for their new year updates.....resolutions to organize and purge...enhance and refine... expand or contract... our cyber bits and bytes. Our respective digital footprints, personalities, inventories. (And boy do I have work on the cyber front. This blog, case in point.)
I am always a bit suspect of those who claim they do not make New Year's resolutions. I mean...who amongst us can resist the temptation of a fresh start, a do-over, a make-good on something.? Even IF one's resolve is evanescent.....the intention and discipline short-lived....with a perhaps inevitable bout of self-flagellation and/or resignation down the pike?
Surely, the intent itself is worth something. For doesn't it reflect self-awareness? Recognition of the value and nobility of self-improvement? A perceived at least, acknowledgment of what is probably better for us and for those around us, and the promise and potential benefit of such positive change?? Everything, even resolve, requires practice, and an 'if at first you don't succeed' mind set, does it not?
Yes, in my all-too-smug-mind, resolutions have great merit. (Particularly those I quite magnanimously make for Husband.) Consequently, mine are always expansive, with categories and sub-categories. Divided into behavioral, material, meditative, physical, organizational and intellectual files..with a little self-growth and understanding thrown in for good measure. (I mean, why be stingy?) I am nothing if not naively ambitious about fresh starts. Oh and that pesky cyber stuff too. Yes, my goals and intentions are grand and far-reaching. Such resolute expansiveness makes me feel virtuous and self-congratulatory, with an (albeit comically ill-founded) sense of just a little more control over things in the year ahead.
But all great journeys start with a first step, and I'd like to share one of mine. Allow me to outline the process for you:
RESOLUTION CATEGORY: Reduce waste.
SubCategory: Reduce paper waste
Sub-subCategory: Reduce paper waste in my mailbox, i.e. junk mail
Sub-subsubCategory: Reduce paper waste and junk mail of my own and all that I now get ever since I changed my parents' billing and mailing address to my own.
You can readily see the issue at hand. So my first baby step of the year in the name of my Waste Reduction Resolution was to
download the app Paper Karma. The download onto your phone is a breeze (doesn't work on iPad), requires only a camera shot of the mailing address of the catalog offender, (used it today on the Boston Proper Catalog)
and rather neatly, uses GPS to locate your home address so you don't even need to go to the trouble of typing it in. You quickly and easily get an acknowledgment of a successful submission, and I am anxious to see if once the lag time passes, it does indeed, REDUCE ALL OF THAT NEEDLESS, VEXING JUNK MAIL.
I may also have to give it a test drive on charitable and other mail solicitations. And BTW, I love the look of its nifty icon. Simple app elegance to kickstart one of many <way too many> New Year's Resolutions.
I thought you might like it as well :)