The past couple of months have been somewhat confusing and admittedly challenging for me. On countless occasions, I have sat in front of my computer with every intention of getting everyone in the world – or at least my small tribe of faithful readers – to think a bit about their lives and to remember to live NOW. And yet, for whatever reason, as I start to write, something always comes up. More accurately, some excuse always presents itself, and I jump at the opportunity to focus my attention elsewhere. “I have to work”, “Tyler needs a Wii buddy”, and “I need to fix that squeaky door” are just a few of the more recent excuses that have prevented me from doing what I really want to do.

The truth of the matter is that over the last few years, there have been two defining experiences in my life that are primarily responsible for my commitment to trying to live now. These events not only changed my life, they also dramatically altered how I see my world around me. It is because of these events that AlwaysLiveNOW.com was created, and it is through these two trying, and enlightening, times in my life that most of my personal growth has occurred. Don’t get me wrong, I will be the first to admit that I have a long way to go, but I know that because of these two events, my life is on a different, better path, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything.

The first event, which I have already shared, was when Tyler had his health scare. Feeling like there was a very real possibility that I was going to lose my son changed my life. The preciousness of NOW was made abundantly clear to me. As painful as that time was for us, it has been relatively easy to share the experience because 1) Tyler is happy and healthy and his medication has helped control his epilepsy, and 2) the positive impact of this wake-up call has been profound.

I now have a much better awareness and appreciation for my blessed life, and I know that every moment is an opportunity to be embraced and enjoyed.

The second event has been much harder to come to terms with, and this is why I feel like I have reached a writer’s block of sorts. I know that I want and need to tell this story since what I have learned from it with respect to living now has been tremendous, but actually sitting down to write it has been surprisingly difficult. Given that an inordinate amount of my own personal growth has resulted from this experience, I feel it is important to share it, but I would by lying if I said there wasn’t a part of me that still longed for the blissful ignorance I had before it happened.

One year ago, the seemingly happy, healthy relationship I had with my parents for 35 years was forever altered in a matter of minutes. To celebrate my 35th birthday, Andrea and I had invited my parents and my sister to our house for the weekend. Everything seemed normal, everyone seemed happy. The whole weekend felt like one of our typical fun family get-togethers. Unfortunately, as is often the case when the straw breaks the camel’s back, a seemingly trivial matter changed everything. In this case, the straw that broke my parents’ back was a possible change in plans for an upcoming weekend visit. We had been talking about getting together at their house in a few weeks when I mentioned that one of the proposed weekends wouldn’t work for us because something had come up that was important for my family – me, Andrea, Tyler and Kailey. Surprisingly, this not only broke the camels back, it effectively broke every bone in the poor camel’s body.

It still seems almost unreal to me when I think about it, but my parents totally lost it. Apparently, in their opinion, it was completely unacceptable for me to prioritize my family over them. It was, and still is, unbelievable to me how much rage they had. Don’t get me wrong, I have seen my parents angry on plenty of occasions, but this time was totally different. My dad kept screaming and yelling and basically challenged me to a fist fight, while my mom kept going on and on about how much Andrea and I, and the rest of the world for that matter, constantly took advantage of her, and how fed up she was with it. The whole thing completely caught me off guard. I honestly didn’t know how to respond. It was both infuriating and heartbreaking at the same time. The hardest part to swallow through it all was the fact that both Andrea and I had constantly bent over backwards to do things for them and to include them in our lives because we loved them, and yet there we were, in our own backyard, being physically and verbally attacked for “constantly taking advantage of them”.

Needless to say, the visit was over within the hour, and I was left to process what had just transpired. It still felt hard to believe. I kept replaying my parents’ reactions and behavior over and over in my head – the anger, the resentment, all of the accusations. Even though they had inappropriately attacked both me and Andrea, I felt like I must have really done something wrong to make them behave that way. I moped around for the better part of a week, part of me waiting for an apology from them, the rest of me blaming myself for everything. At the end of a miserable week, it dawned on me that, while my parents obviously felt a certain way, I didn’t have to blindly subscribe to their story just because they were my parents. Despite their anger and hostility, I honestly didn’t feel as though I had done anything wrong. If anything, I felt like I should be the angry one given the fact that I felt like I had constantly prioritized their feelings and had always worked hard to make sure they felt like they were a part of the family, and the result was their open hostility.

Eventually, I emailed them what I was feeling. It was a painstaking writing exercise since I wanted to make sure the message conveyed how much I loved them, but also how disappointed I was by what had transpired. I assumed responsibility for the things I could have done better, and I focused on being clear, calm, and constructive, because I wanted to work through the issues so we could begin repairing our relationship. Their responses were unexpected to say the least. Rather than admit to any of their responsibility for all of the mess – or at least acknowledging how wildly inappropriate their behavior was – my dad sent a one line reply that he “couldn’t control my interesting perception” and my mom said that I was wrong, she was right and that she had even more she wanted to say, but that she wasn’t sure I could handle it. Nice. Baffled, and admittedly a little angry, I told her to go ahead and continue sharing. I thought it couldn’t possibly get worse, but, without going into all of the details, suffice it to say that it definitely has.

The past twelve months have been an overwhelming, painful, empowering, frustrating, enlightening, often bizarre, sometimes comedic, sometimes tragic journey into the truth of yet another perfectly “normal”, dysfunctional family.

I have had to face some truths about my family that I chose to ignore, or at least deny, for all of my life. Just like every other family in the world, we had our problems. And just like every other person in the world, my parents had their own set of issues.

Unfortunately, in my family, no one ever wanted to talk about them, or even admit that they existed. I had gone so far as to convince myself that I was lucky because my family was perfect, and I think that is the primary reason why all of this has been so eye opening and challenging. The mind is definitely powerful, and ignorance definitely was bliss. The harsh reality is that I spent a lot of my relationship with my parents – for as long as I can remember – feeling like I wasn’t good enough, being afraid of my dad’s temper, working my tail off trying to make them happy, and it never seemed to be enough for them. The weekend blowup was just another example, albeit a more explosive one than normal, of them making me feel like I was responsible for their happiness, and that I had failed.

It has been hard coming to terms with the reality of my true family dynamic, particularly given how long I had believed my “perfect family myth”, but the worst part has been that, to this day, neither of my parents are even willing to acknowledge their part in any of this. My dad has removed himself from the situation completely – I haven’t heard from him in a year – and my mom continues to dismiss and deny any possibility other than her perception that I, like the rest of the world, just constantly takes advantage of her.

Over the course of the year, as I have tried to encourage getting to the bottom of what is really going on, my mom has called me everything from “just an angry little kid” to “a pompous, Dr Oz-a**hole wannabe”

(I think she meant Dr. Phil, at least I hope she meant Dr. Phil) to somebody who “just can’t handle the truth”, to name just a few. I would be lying if I said the personal attacks and passive-aggressive jabs didn’t hurt, but the reality is that my parents’ resistance, denial and anger have actually helped promote healing. Their behavior has forced me to really work on myself, to focus on my own issues, and to let go of trying to fix things that are not my responsibility to fix. With my parents, I now know that, as much as I would love for them to be happy, I am not solely responsible for their happiness. At some point, just like I am trying to do in my own life, they are going to have to process their own emotional baggage. The events of the past year have helped me start to do that, and I feel like I have learned a lot about myself, and have identified some of my behaviors that I really want to work on changing. Some of the more important things I have learned that have really helped me live NOW include the following:

Healthy relationships are built upon open, honest communication
More than anything I have learned throughout this experience, I now firmly believe that happy, healthy relationships – even the relationships we have with ourselves – are built upon openness and honesty. Anything less has the potential to lead to bitterness, anger, and resentment. If we are unable to be honest and productively communicate with our loved ones, how can we possibly expect there to be the necessary level of trust to build a healthy, sustainable relationship? From my own experience, I know that whenever I bottle things up, it only leads to frustration, tension, and ultimately, resentment. In the end, something has to give. It is impossible to carry around resentment forever. And then, when all of the bottled up anger and resentment finally come pouring out, it can be difficult to repair the relationships that have been impacted. Being open and honest as much as possible is really the only way that I have found to keep feelings of resentment from starting.

Ironically, in the last communication I received from my mom, she said that through this experience her main epiphany has been that all of this could have been avoided if she would have kept her true feelings to herself, because “I obviously couldn’t handle it”. I feel like she is missing the main point. I think hiding is sometimes the easy thing to do, but I actually think it is probably the least productive thing you can do to foster healthy relationships. I believe that a lot of the heartache of the past year could have been avoided if my parents had been much more honest with themselves, and with the whole family from the beginning. Instead, they have chosen to bottle up their true feelings for the better part of their lives, at least as long as I have known them, and the resulting resentment has been profound.

Everyone has their own issues
For the longest time, I felt like I was the only one who had any issues. I felt like everyone around me always had it together, and that there must be something wrong with me because I felt like a complete mess at times. I grew up convinced that my parents were infallible, and as I got older, anytime any point of contention arose in our relationship, I naturally assumed that I was at fault. Over the course of the past year, my mom has shared with me some of the details of her childhood. She grew up in a situation where she rarely felt loved, and where she always felt like she had to do things for others to get them to value her. No matter what she did, she never felt like it was good enough for her parents. Similarly, she shared that my dad has his own set of emotional issues stemming from a childhood raised in an abusive environment where he was made to feel unwanted and unloved.

Hearing this, hearing that my role models – the people that I thought were perfect and had it all together – had been carrying around their own fears, inadequacies, and insecurities for almost 60 years was incredibly eye-opening. It helped me see that we all have our issues, and it showed my how powerful our issues are at shaping how we perceive the world around us.

In my life, I grew up in an environment where I felt like what I did was never good enough.

Now, I am beginning to see how this has impacted who I am today. Whenever I am in a new situation, I am terribly insecure and I feel like everyone is judging me. And given my history of never feeling good enough, I naturally feel like everyone is judging me negatively, thus confirming in my mind that I am not good enough. It almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in a way. I have been conditioned to feel a certain way about myself, just like my parents have been conditioned to feel a certain way about themselves, so we always end up finding exactly what we have been programmed to believe. Every innocuous word, deed or even passing glance becomes a confirmation of our worst fears.

Now that I am finally being open and honest about my own set of fears and insecurities, it has become abundantly clear to me that I am not alone. Everyone I talk to, almost without fail, has shared with me the challenges and issues that they face in their own lives. Whether we choose to admit to them and deal with them is an entirely different issue, but the reality is that we are all carrying around our fair share of emotional baggage. Knowing that I am not alone has allowed me to cut myself some slack, and to realize that I don’t have to be perfect.

I get to choose how I feel
I am not trying to fool myself into believing that I am in total control of my emotions. Far from it. Instead, what I am trying to better understand is that I am ultimately responsible for how I feel about myself. In the past – even the very recent past – I would allow other people to dictate how I felt about myself on an almost daily basis. It’s frustrating, but it’s true. With respect to my parents, for as long as I can remember, I would regularly let their words and actions make me feel guilty, wrong, even selfish to name just a few. Even with a family of my own, I still found myself susceptible to the slightest suggestion that I wasn’t being “the good son”. I never wanted to let them down – I don’t know anyone who wants to disappoint their parents – so I worked even harder trying to include them, and to make sure that they knew how much they were loved. But laboring under a cloud of guilt will take its toll, and there is no denying the fact that I felt like I deserved a medal for my efforts, not more guilt for not having done enough.

Now, I have a better understanding of the distinction between how I really feel, and how I am allowing someone else to make me feel. It is a precarious balance. Through this experience, I have a much better appreciation for how destructive empowering others with how I feel can be. Thankfully, I have grown to a point where I realize that I can take that power back. For me, the key is in figuring out how to be empathetic and supportive to others, while also making sure that I don’t let their issues shape how I feel about myself.

As trying as this experience has been, from a “glass is half full” perspective, it has also been an incredible gift. I feel like I have only scratched the surface with respect to how much I have learned and how much it has positively impacted my ability to live NOW. I want to be true to myself, and to those around me. I want to develop and maintain meaningful, respectful relationships built on honesty. I want to be empathetic to those around me who need it, but to take back ownership of how I feel about myself. The price of these lessons has been high, but I feel like I have been blessed with a unique opportunity to see, and to work on – and hopefully fix! – some of my own potentially destructive behaviors before it is too late.

Team sports were a big part of my childhood. I played almost every sport, and loved every minute of it. I loved practices, games, being part of a team, everything. I couldn’t wait for game days, when I would finally get to put on my crisp, clean uniform. I felt like a professional athlete. When I coached Tyler’s first soccer team, I tried to focus most of my energy on helping the kids have fun, so they would have a similar experience. Personally, it was rewarding for me to see them progress as players, but most importantly, it was great to see them enjoying themselves. In my life, I have had both good and bad coaches, so I wanted to make sure I didn’t coach the fun out of the game. The fact that they never really listened much to what I was saying helped.

All things considered, we were pretty successful as a soccer team. Flush with success as a soccer coach, I was presented with the opportunity to sign up as a coach for Tyler’s first baseball season. I declined. A big part of me wanted to be involved, but I also wanted Tyler to be part of a team without his dad as the coach. Plus, I figured it would be nice to sit in the stands, cheer for him and his team, and not lose sleep trying to figure out how to get eleven 5 year olds to listen to me. Seemed like a win-win.

Well, like most of my best laid plans, things did not work out exactly as I had envisioned. Relaxed, bleacher-sitting, cold-drink-in-hand Zach became Coach Zach when the league called and said they were short head coaches. They said that Tyler’s team would have to be broken up, with the players sent to other teams, unless a head coach could be found. I tried my best negotiating skills, but the call lasted all of about 30 seconds and by the end of it, I was the head coach.

I believe I am also responsible for washing the league president’s car every Saturday as well. I have never been a good negotiator.

To be honest, I wasn’t all that disappointed in postponing relaxed, bleacher-sitting, cold-drink-in-hand Zach. I’m sure it would have been fun, and I think someday it will be good for Tyler to be on a team where he isn’t the “coach’s kid”, but baseball was my favorite sport growing up. I still miss playing catch with my friends, shagging fly balls and taking batting practice until it was way past my bedtime. I was excited to have 11 new little buddies to play some baseball with for the next few months.

Having played and watched baseball for almost 30 years, I am fairly adept at the rules of the game. As I prepared for our first practice, I quickly realized that coaching baseball was going to be a much bigger challenge than coaching soccer. Beginning soccer is actually pretty easy to coach. You basically just have to say “use only your feet and try to kick the ball in the goal”. That’s pretty much it. Baseball is much different. First of all, you have to learn how to catch. Much harder than kicking. Also, baseball has a bunch of rules that, for a 5 year old playing it for the first time, can be fairly confusing. Rules like “you can run through 1st base and home plate, but not 2nd base or 3rd base because you can be tagged out”.

Given my previous experience with 5 year olds, I decided to shelve the more technical details for later in the season.

For our first practice, I didn’t schedule much. I mainly just wanted to see everyone throwing, catching, running and swinging the bat. I wanted to see what I was working with. It was quite a sight. Everyone was excited, tried their best and, thankfully, no one got hurt. It’s funny, but since coaching soccer, my benchmark for success at practice has become whether or not we avoided any injuries. Prior to my first practice ever as a coach, I had a laundry list of everything I wanted to accomplish. Now, with a dose of 5 year old reality under my belt, I focus mainly on keeping everyone safe. Don’t get me wrong, I still want everyone to have fun, become a team and learn to play the game, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a good practice if no one cries.

I actually started trying to coach a little bit at our second practice. Everyone wanted to bat, but I explained that if we couldn’t catch and throw, it would make for a long season. After showing them the proper way to catch a baseball, I turned them loose playing catch with their parents. About 30 seconds in, I had two kids with bloody noses. We had our work cut out for us. Over the past few weeks, in preparation for our first game, everyone has been working really hard and we have actually made some good progress. As a bonus, there have been no more bloody noses.

Opening ceremonies and our first game were this past Saturday, and I wasn’t really sure what to expect. In practice, I often get the impression that the kids either don’t hear me, or they are completely ignoring me. I do know that there must be something incredibly fascinating about infield dirt, since most of my infielders spend the majority of their time digging holes or building little dirt mountains. I know it must be hard for a 5 year old to stand still, patiently waiting for a baseball to come their way. Particularly with a sea of magnificent infield dirt beckoning to them. But I do remember listening to my coaches, and I seem to remember doing what they told me. The Dragons don’t necessarily adhere to that same code.

The Dragons seem to prefer anarchy. Case in point – lining up for opening ceremonies.

All we had to do was line up as a team under the sign that had our team name on it. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong. We could not make it happen. In my head I kept thinking, “choose your battles wisely”, but I also wanted to keep the kids in their line so we would be ready to run onto the field when we were called. The kids weren’t having it. It’s not that they weren’t listening. They would look at me, nod their heads and get in line. It’s just that the minute I turned around, my line quickly became more of a roving mob. In their defense, we were positioned right next to a large mound of their favorite infield dirt. The dirt must have been calling their names, because they were physically unable to stop themselves from breaking from the line to stand in it, kick it, pick it up or dig into it with their hands. Every time I asked them to get back in line, they looked at me with an expression that seemed to say, “poor man, don’t you understand that this is bigger than you, and bigger than us? We have no control, we must play with this dirt, regardless of how many times you ask us to stay in line.” I must say, if you ever feel invincible, like there isn’t anything you can’t do, I suggest you try keeping eleven 5 year old boys out of a mound of dirt for 15 minutes. It can’t be done.

After successfully surviving opening ceremonies, we had to wait a few hours for our first big game. When it was finally our turn to take the field, I couldn’t have been more proud of my little Dragons. First and foremost, I don’t think there is anything cuter than little kids in full blown baseball uniforms.

They look like little, scaled down professional baseball players. They were all excited, they all ran to where they were supposed to go and the digging in the dirt was pretty minimal.

I am biased, of course, but I think our first game was a huge success, and a great sign of things to come. There were almost too many highlights to mention, but some of my favorites were watching Tyler’s eyes light up when he hit his “super far shot”, watching my first baseman’s whole face disappear behind a huge smile when he caught the ball thrown to him for an out, and seeing my little catcher come out all geared up for the first inning.

Watching my pitcher single-handedly chase down four base runners on one play also brought a smile to my face. But my personal favorite had to be the impromptu wrestling match that broke out in shallow left field between three of my players, none of whom was willing to let go of the ball. It lasted about 30 seconds, which was plenty of time for the batter to make it all the way home. The only thing I could think to say afterwards was “good hustle guys”. I love t-ball.

I think being around kids is great therapy. I know it is for me. I don’t know at what age things start to get complicated, or more accurately, when we start to complicate things, but I know it isn’t at 5. At 5, it’s about playing, and playing hard. It’s about hitting, catching and building dirt castles at second base. Kids fully commit to whatever they’re doing, whether their parents or coaches want them to or not. 5 year olds also don’t dwell on things. As soon as the game was over, all that mattered in the world to them was getting a hot dog and a slushie at the snack bar. No stressing out over the mistakes made during the game, no agonizing over the fact that they weren’t perfect, no worrying about what other kids thought about how they played. Just laughter and hot dogs. I think kids are smarter than we give them credit for.

If you ever get the chance to ride in a Lexus, I highly recommend it. They are absurdly comfortable and are without question, the smoothest cars I have ever ridden in. For the record, I am not Lexus material. Not yet at least. Actually, I’m not really a “car guy”, but every once in awhile I’ll see a Lexus rolling down the highway, and I’ll think about how fun it would be to drive such a cool car. Then I think about the car payment, and my focus quickly shifts to things like braces and college funds and I move on. Recently, I saw a brand new Lexus and I thought about their old marketing slogan, “The Relentless Pursuit of Perfection”. As I watched the car drive by, it dawned on me. Like Lexus, my life has been my own personal, relentless pursuit of perfection.

My pursuit began at an early age. As a child, I had a “strong, silent type” father who rarely shared his thoughts and feelings. All I really wanted, like most sons, was for him to be proud of me. But growing up, I can’t remember ever hearing him say that he was. As a result, I became incredibly competitive. Everything I did – school, sports, everything – was a competition. An opportunity to win, to be “perfect”.

I felt like if I could do something “perfectly”, surely it would finally make him proud. But no matter how hard I tried, the words never came. I was never perfect, always could have done better, always could have scored more points. The seeds of my “relentless pursuit of perfection” had been planted.

I’ve been told that “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” and as it was, my dad was also incredibly competitive. He would never let me win at anything, ever. Whether we were playing cards, basketball or trivial pursuit, he won every time. No matter how hard I tried, I was never good enough. I am not saying that I wanted him to “throw” a game on purpose, but would it have killed him to let me win every once in awhile? To let me experience feeling good enough just once?

We played sports quite a bit when I was a scrawny, uncoordinated kid, but once I grew to a point where I could give him a legitimate run for his money, we stopped. He was always too busy. I never had the chance to prove to him that I was good enough, and that he should be proud of me. He didn’t allow it.

Now, as an adult, one of the biggest struggles I continue to face is my insatiable need to be perfect. It isn’t a matter of “wanting to be perfect” or even “hoping to be perfect”, I feel like I MUST be perfect in order to feel valuable. This need has affected every area of my life – career, relationships, parenting, everything. I have been wired with this unattainable need for perfection to try to achieve some sense of self-worth. I remember working on a large project a few years ago. I was alone at work on a Saturday night stressed out about a looming deadline. Completely overwhelmed, I found myself lying on the floor in the middle of my office fully convinced that I was having a heart attack. I was having trouble breathing and my whole body ached. Sadly, the only reason I didn’t go to the emergency room was because I figured people would laugh at me for being overly dramatic. I didn’t care about the health ramifications of a possible heart attack. I was just worried about how people would perceive me if I was wrong.

The real trouble with tying my feelings of self-worth to something as elusive as perfection is that I am unbelievably hard on myself all the time. Whatever I do, I always feel like I could have, should have, done better. I constantly judge myself, and I am ruthless. Photographs are the worst. I can’t tell you how many times I have looked at a great picture of the family on some fun adventure, smiling faces all over the place, everyone having a wonderful time, and all I can think is “my goodness is my forehead really that big” or “geez I have got to get to the gym”.

I think we all do that to a certain extent, but just once, I would love to look at a picture and say “my goodness, who is that handsome devil?” and really mean it.

But no, I continue to be my own worst critic. It’s frustrating and exhausting, but I almost feel like every time I fail, or need help, or don’t know the answer, that I am a kid again trying hard to make my dad proud. Most of the time, I end up feeling like I did when I was a kid – that I wasn’t good enough. So, after knocking back a half gallon of ice cream, I vow to try even harder and end up pushing myself even more to be perfect. Admittedly, not exactly the healthiest way of handling the situation.

For the past year or so, I have tried to work on embracing my imperfections, but it’s hard. I often get frustrated when I read or hear that “there is no such thing as perfect” or “we are all perfect in our own way”. I don’t disagree, it’s just that these assertions never seem to take into account the “why” behind our relentless pursuits. To me, they seem to gloss over just how important the need for perfection can be to a person. To a 5 year old who thinks that being perfect is the only way to make his dad proud of him, or an adult who has spent 35 years trying to be perfect to achieve some level of self-worth, “perfection” is not just a subjective impossibility that shouldn’t be worried about. It is a need. Impossible to fulfill, but a need nonetheless.

Focusing on the question “why” has been the only way that I have made any progress on slowing my relentless pursuit. Why do I feel like I need to be perfect? Why do I feel like I am never good enough? Why am I so hard on myself? Now that I am a father myself, I think a lot about what kind of father my dad was for me. The painful reality for me, one that I have had a difficult time coming to terms with, is that my dad wasn’t always who I needed him to be. I love my dad, and I know that he did his best. For that I am incredibly grateful. He is by no means solely responsible for all of my issues, but the truth of the matter is that the choices he made as my father have had a lasting impact on my life – good and bad.

Having a clearer understanding of my “why” has given me the strength to work on addressing the problem. My relentless pursuit has left me exhausted and insecure, and I’m no closer to perfection than when I started. The reality is that I am not perfect, never will be perfect, but I have people that love me just the way I am. I am no longer that little kid trying to make his dad proud. I no longer need that. First and foremost, I am trying to cut myself some slack. Obsessing over trying to be perfect isn’t something that I consciously choose to do, it’s just a product of who I am. Big forehead, wrong answers, missed shots, whatever it is, I am working at trying to love it, because it’s me. And besides, my wife loves me, and she’s hot and smart, so I can’t be all bad, right?

Happy New Year! Actually, Happy New Decade! Whenever a new year comes around, I tend to get wrapped up in hopeless optimism and expect it to finally be the year where I either 1) win the lottery despite the fact that I never play, 2) find a gigantic gold nugget despite the fact that I don’t go gold panning or 3) get randomly spotted by a Holly wood agent and become the next megastar despite the fact that I can’t sing, dance or act. When it comes to the potential of a brand new year, I never let common sense slow me down.

My achilles heel of New Years has always been my New Year’s resolutions. My unbridled enthusiasm for the potential of a brand new year causes me to set my sites absurdly high. Where a rational person would make reasonable resolutions like “travel more this year” or “exercise more regularly”, I, on the other hand, go overboard with resolutions that are virtually impossible for me to live up to. Sure, it is a great idea to “wake up every morning and go running”, but highly unlikely given the fact that I am not in the least bit a morning person and I really don’t enjoy running.

For the most part, I do what a lot of us do and focus most of my resolutions on diet and exercise. At 6’ tall and plus or minus 190 pounds, I am not terribly out of shape, but I am also fully aware of what 6’ 190 has the potential of looking like.

Let’s just say that I am a little softer around the edges.

The fatal flaw with my typical resolution is that, simply put, I am not capable of actually doing what I resolve to do. January 1st always rolls around after a month of holiday binge eating, so that, coupled with my propensity of aiming too high, is a dangerous combination. With every fiber of my being, I fully commit to getting in shape by “exercising 7 days a week” and “eating only healthy foods”. Things usually start out okay, but invariably – typically no later than January 12th – I have failed. I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person, yet every year I seem to think that my taste in food will change overnight and I will no longer have the desire to eat anything unhealthy. To date, this has not happened. I still love pizza, ice cream and countless other delicacies that are not in the least bit “healthy”.

This year, I am still incredibly optimistic about the new year and a new decade, but I am going to try a different, healthier approach to my resolutions.

Resolution 1 – Do the best that I can: I would love to be in phenomenal shape, who wouldn’t? I would also love to be the world’s greatest husband, father, friend and brother. I would love to be a great writer, a great athlete. There are a lot of things that I would love to be the best at. Will I be? Probably not. Despite my best intentions, I will make mistakes, say the wrong things and fail as often as I succeed. As long as I always do the best that I can, I couldn’t ask anything more from myself.

Resolution 2 – Have a positive attitude: Quite honestly, 2009 was a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me.

I must admit, I am glad to finally bid it adieu. Between the stress of unemployment and an upsetting estrangement from my parents, I spent quite a bit of the year with a heavy heart. Towards the end of the year, I began to realize that my life is full of variables outside of my control, and that I was letting these outside influences negatively impact me. The only thing that I can control – through good times and bad – is my attitude. Like most of us, I undoubtedly will be tested with many more obstacles this year. The truth of the matter is that, even in bad times, I have many things to be thankful for.

This year, I am going to focus on the good things in my life and try to meet every challenge with a positive attitude.

Resolution 3 – Live NOW: Given that this has been the focus of my life for the past 18 months and is the subject of my blog, you would think that I would have this one down pat. You would be wrong. Even I need constant reminders to treasure every “now” that I have been blessed with and to enjoy every moment to the best of my ability. For me, it is more of a journey than a destination. If I don’t make the conscious decision to live NOW, I too easily get overwhelmed with all of the trials, tribulations and stresses of life. Life is too short to waste even one NOW!

I feel like I might finally be on to something. I might actually be able to live up to these resolutions. I can’t wait to see what can be accomplished simply by doing my best with a positive attitude. I don’t know about you, but I sure am ready for a great year.