Daily nerve

"Last good nerve of the day."
- my daughter

There is no other way. Life restarts every morning around the world. In nature and over the vast bodies of water that make up our blue planet. In rural and urban homes, from hovels to apartments and palaces.

In company offices, healthy, financially troubled, or simply unsure of what 2009 will bring. In stock exchanges and regulatory offices. On the work floors of factories, still thriving or getting eerily quiet.

For those who are focused on restoring financial security, and for those who press for using the opportunity of the financial crisis to halt climate change and create a sustainable world with new paradigms.

Life starts anew every day, and for every one. Grand visions of a better life and a better world are still achieved through journeys of daily steps, each of them involving personal choices and smart work to overcome the odds.

To make ends meet for loved ones in challenging times continues to require a daily journey of perseverance, seeing and using opportunities, and making smart personal choices in many moments throughout the day.

In sum, these daily journeys are about taking personal responsibility for life, and for consistently doing the small things that add up to big results which in turn build, or rebuild, our life dreams. Blaming others can feel great, but doesn't help at all.

This early in the year, getting organized to turn my resolutions for 2009 into results is important to me. I need to feel confident that I keep making progress on my journey, that I walk on the right path, and avoid getting stuck in dead-end side roads.

So I have been focusing these past weeks on how to make small steps consistently, which continues to challenge me daily. I need to keep creating and sticking with good habits. Having done well yesterday amounts to little when the new day arrives. I need to nurture and reinforce positive habits on a daily basis to get the results I want!

This year, several of my new year's resolutions have made it into a nifty little application called Joe's goals that I discovered "accidentally" on the internet. It allows people to jot down their intentions, positive ones to reinforce, and negative ones to get rid off. Daily achievement is tracked by simply clicking on the ones that were "done." A simple click is all it takes for a nice green tick to record the good result.

I read years ago that when people manage to keep doing something new for 30 days, there is a high chance that they will continue doing it out of habit. It is human nature to do so. I will test this hypothesis in this 1st quarter of 2009!

Yet for all the planning I can do and improvements I can make, life continues to surprise me with unexpected turns and messy situations, and I have decided to welcome that too.

Last week, I dropped my notebook computer on the floor, and the screen's backlight stopped working. Not something to make into a habit, for sure. Thankfully, I found that I could get the hard disk swapped easily into another unit by the ever helpful IT colleagues in my office, even during the weekend. What a relief!

It made me think that I need to get better organized with my computering this year, especially for my personal stuff, which is now stored on the same computer I use for work after my old Pentium IV home PC broke down a year ago.

I decided that I want to graduate to a Mac for my personal use. I realized that I prefer a simple computing environment with programs that look after my needs with minimum fuss. Mac works that way, and I will keep my notebook PC for office. I'm now waiting for Life 09 to be bundled with Mac, which will hopefully happen this month.

In another area of life, after almost of two years of study in my free time, I graduated from my life coaching course just before the new year. It marks a big milestone for achieving one of my life dreams, which is to help people around me live better "now."

At the end of the day, I now enjoy tabulating the results of my good intentions in Joe's Goals. They are all personal, and they matter to me, like my daughter savors what she calls her "last good nerve of the day."

Photograph: An observing bird in Bali zoo.