One the most common habits in our lives is to hide our ignorance by telling lies. It’s not that we wish to be untrustworthy people or trick people out of their possessions; although many of our fellow citizens live by these means. It is more to do with simply being liked, wanted, accepted, needed, and loved; to belong in other words.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Perhaps one of greatest skills (both constructive and destructive) is to thrive by deception. Deprived by evolution of claws, sabre-teeth and armoured skin, we began to use our intellect to survive.

Sadly, as implied above, many of us use our intellect to deceive others out of their possessions; but many more of us use our intellect for brighter purposes; protecting our children, healing our sick and empowering our disadvantaged.

There is a great danger in our intellect though. It was not intended to merely help us think our way forward, but to think ourselves out of death. In other words; we think to live. It is not so much a case of we think therefore we are, as a case of we are because we think.

There is no use in hiding behind the pantomimes we have created to justify our actions and plans. Our greatest asset and liability is our intellect, and barring illness or injury to that intellect, it is that intellect which is responsible for whom we are and what we do.

A man might stop being violent or a women become aggressive in the workplace, but if their thinking remains un-evolved then the actions of the past will return. It is not history that repeats itself – it is our thinking. If it remains aggressive or passive, obsessive or tyrannical – then all the activity in the world will merely cycle back to those states.

Now previous times were not always bad, nor good, nor noteworthy – but they were manifestations of our thinking, our intellect, at that time. If we are able to discern that things are getting worse or better or are remaining static, it is not actions that we ought to evaluate. It is notions, ideas and theories.

Long before the spear mutated into the nuclear missile it was an imagining within our minds and just as this year is in the process of renewing itself, I suggest that among all those resolutions concerning chocolate, coffee, gym-memberships and job seeking, we consider a resolution that few do; What are we; what am I going to do about our/my thinking? ...

New Year; Old Thinking? – New Year; New Thinking? – New Year; No Thinking?

Whatever you choose Happy New Year – although that depends upon how you think about It – Doesn’t It?