In a candid chat with my 11-year-old nephew, he told me that his New Year’s resolution for 2018 was to come up with a better New Year’s Resolution for 2019.

He then told me that he will continue to make that resolution until Donald Trump is no longer President of the United States because if he makes a specifc resolution, he wants to be able to keep it, and in the current political climate, he was not sure if he could stick to any promise he made.

Had I not seen the words come out of his mouth myself, I would have thought that someone was speaking for him. But in his own child-like wisdom, he knew the importance of promises and being able to keep them, and for his own innocent reasons- or reasons that may have been influenced by his parents’ discussions that he may have overheard, he decided that he only wanted to make a promise in an environment that would allow him to stick to it.

It led me to consider just how many of us make resolutions at the dawn of the New Year in the name of being part of the ‘New Year, New Me’ trend, only to fall terribly short just days, weeks or months into the year in question.

Yet, here was an 11 year old, who had considered the importance of sticking to his word at such an early age and who refused to make a promise unless he was certain he could keep it. We are just days into 2018, how have your resolutions been going so far? I urge that as we go forward, let us not set ourselves up for disappointment, and instead make promises or resolutions that we are sure to follow through on.

As always, do enjoy the stories that we have put together for you, in the first edition of the Pepperpot for the year 2018.
Happy New Year!