Another year is around the corner and people are probably assessing their progress on what they promised to achieve this year. For me, this year was a part of a bigger promise, so here I am with a list of things that I'll try to do by the time earth will complete one more revolution around the sun.

I know it is too early for a list of resolutions. I know earth is not at that arbitrary location in space yet, but hey, come on! I have time to write and publish this post right now, I don't know if I'd even want to do it if I leave it for the right time.

Let me begin by saying that this time the list of promises is not from my own mind. This is a list that I stole from Jeffrey Way and Jonathan Sampson about 2 years ago.

Jeffrey posted this list as his resolution for the year 2014, and I liked it so much that I decided to make it my own resolution with slight changes adopted from Jonathan's comment on Jeffrey's post, and some of my own. The only problem at that time was, I did not qualify for the ground requirements to proceed with these promises. So I saved it to come back to it at a later time when I can truly appreciate the philosophy behind these words and began to proceed with those ground requirements as my resolution for year 2014.

It turned out over the course of last two years that I had a lot to change, so much so that it took me almost two years to finally pull up this list and dare to commit to these promises. A heavy transition in my attitude took place in last 3 month, it may or may not be because of Kashif Razzaqui, but either way, I'm glad it happened.

I'm glad to have done that.

Now let me tell you what kind of a person I want to be in year 2016, or in next two years if that is what it takes.

I want to:

1. Enter every conversation with the assumption that I might be wrong.

2. Debate the merits of the text without making assumptions about the person's mental state.

3. Continue asking questions and debating.

4. Respect all opinions just as long as there is no unreasonable or illogical reason behind their existence. If they stem solely out of one's belief in a particular book or person, politely refuse to continue the conversation.

5. Shut up in emotionally charged situation. It takes a lot of understanding between two people to reconcile an emotional conflict. Not everyone is good at handling emotions.

6. Preface every life decision with "will this make my life simpler?".

7. Use a lot of smiley faces. They solve all text-based misunderstandings.

That is probably a lot of stuff for my restless brain to care about, that is why I decided to put it up on my blog. It will be a great help if you can call me out, publicly or privately, when you find me breaching any of the promises I made here.

I'll try my best to become a better person than I've ever been.