I heard you say this year I'm going to... stop smoking, exercise more, take a few night classes, start saving for retirement, eat healthier, cut my alcohol intake by 50%, get more rest and on and on and on. Choices to change. I applaud you for living consciously enough to even realize that some changes might be good.

Unfortunately there are those who don't dare think that on any given day, we can in any way we choose change anything or everything about ourselves and thus our lives. It seems we've somehow been coerced into believing major portions of course of our lives are set in stone and are therefore unchangeable.

This of course could not be further from truth.

On any day we wish we can open a new book for reading or start writing a new and exciting chapter of our own, in our own. We can stretch ourselves to meet new challenges, or we can choose to shrink away from them. At will we can turn old friends new again, and new friends old. We can move up, or we can move on. The choices that we can and must make are essentially endless.

What we must not loose sight of is that these things are in fact CHOICES. And even more importantly we must realize it's through these choices that our history is being continually written.

Most people in world these days are living in cities, some upwards of 30 million individuals as in case of Tokyo, Japan. Chances are you are in a city right now, as this type of living has become prominent choice for those of us on Earth, especially in developed countries. That is not to say that there aren’t many other ways of existing in our world, but for now this seems to be structure that we adhere to. In tribal times we lived at one with nature surrounded by trees, plants, and animals within a close-knit community where everyone was very familiar with everybody else. Now, we are still surrounded by aspects of nature, but it is people that mainly represent living energy around us in daily life. One imperfection that I have become aware of within this social scenario has to do with how humans now see and treat each other.

O.K., you are surrounded by people in suits and business attire rushing to get to their jobs. There are so many faces that admittedly if you tried to take time to connect with all of them you would either go crazy or be completely drained of all your available mental energies. However, we have reacted to this situation in quite a questionable manner. We have begun to treat each other like we treat our livestock, (also a questionable relationship) as if we are just a mass of faceless, nameless bodies. In many moments of our modern technological lifestyle we are now being faced with prospect of talking to machines on phones, being referred to as a customer number rather than our given names, and having conversations with each other that are totally devoid of all real meaning and caring.