Before I begin, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Every new year I have started out with with a large amount of optimism but this year I just can't get my mind focused on what (I wish) this year should look like. I am just not sure why. I think it may have to do with my hyper focus on last years failures. So after 30 some years of making new year resolutions, I have decided not to this year.

“What, no resolutions! You must be a unmotivated person who doesn’t want to plan for the future ,” is what you may be thinking.

This is the farthest from the truth. I find myself a very motivated person and I plan to be myself this year. As a homesteader I have to always have a plan for the future. ( We have Four goat mamas due in the Spring) But I feel that new year’s resolution only set me up for failure.

Every year I have started out with a list of what I am going to do to fix myself and fix the environment around. So essentially I have started every year with a list of my faults and not my strengths. How depressing!

"For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. Psalm 139:13

When instead I should be focusing on what, and who God has made me!  I need to focus on the good and be thankful. Yes, I have faults, but God made us who we are for a reason, and with every fault I have a strength.

“Boast not thyself of tomorrow, for thou knowest not what a day may bring forth.”

Proverbs 27:1

New Year’s resolution also make us make plans without God. I will ……. and I will …….. to accomplish it. But I should be saying," God please help me with ……. and help me accomplish ……. by helping me replace it with ......"

God alone knows my future and every time I try to write it myself, I always fall short.

“Habits are soon assumed; but when we strive to strip them off, it is being flayed alive.” William Cowper

Resolution are a sad attempt to change the habits that I have cultivated for years. How could I possible think that making list of faults, would help me change who I and God have taken years to make. That is a narrow minded point of view.

Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. Psalm 139:16

Every tomorrow is a new blank page that only God can read. When I boast of my plans without seeing that tomorrow is not in my control. I tend to give up when I have a few days of failure. Instead if I see every day as a chance to write a new page, I then begin each day anew.

" Habit, working thus according to nature, is simply nature in action, growing strong by exercise. " Charlotte Mason

Of course not everyday is brand new without writing, for on it is my habits. Habit, bad or good, are our nature, our being and they are written on every page of my life and they are hard to erase or scratch off of our pages of life. I myself have many habits that I wish to rewrite.

"This relation of habit to human life––as the rails on which it runs to a locomotive––is perhaps the most suggestive and helpful to the educator; for just as it is on the whole easier for the locomotive to pursue its way on the rails than to take a disastrous run off them, so it is easier for the child to follow lines of habit carefully laid down than to run off these lines at his peril. It follows that this business of laying down lines towards the unexplored country of the child's future is a very serious and responsible one for the parent. It rests with him to consider well the tracks over which the child should travel with profit and pleasure; and, along these tracks, to lay down lines so invitingly smooth and easy that the little traveler is going upon them at full speed without stopping to consider whether or no he chooses to go that way. " Charlotte Mason

I have home schooled my children now for 10 years, but it has only been the last 4 years that I have use the Charlotte Mason method. I have read only parts of her book series on education. But while reading this part on habits I realized, these principles were true for adults as well. If I see my habits as a train track then could I not build a spur in the track .

How does one change a habit?

Next month I will tell you about the spurs in my track I hope to build this year.