My new year's solution

Forget the resolutions of a new year. I've opted for a new kind of solution … a lively revolution … a healthier constitution … a lot less pollution … a greater contribution … worldwide distribution … and I won't settle for any substitution.

Yep, the new world, according to Monica Vest Wheeler. There's your attribution.

I have this knack, passion and obsession for connecting us all through human experience and history. I have this inexplicable desire to showcase the power and pleasure of history and to encourage people to ignore all the dull facts they were forced to recite as a student. Instead, they should look a little deeper into the emotion of history because it's all about people.

History is human. History is humanity. History is anything but ho-hum.

No moans or groans allowed! That's an order from this self-proclaimed Queen of History!

We create history every day with every decision we make. Fortunately and sometimes unfortunately, we're judged by our unique human chronicles. Our personal behavior paves or blocks the countless roads that encircle us. It's truly our choice whether we move through this life with the grace of an Olympic athlete — a status earned only through vigorous and exhausting emotional and physical workouts … yeah, that everyday life thing — or with the clumsiness of someone who's trying to run and their shoes are tied or Velcroed together.

This human experience and history mantra of mine is quite simple: Pay close attention to those individuals you love or simply know or encounter briefly along the way. Pay attention to what they're saying and not saying, what they're doing and not doing, what they need and don't need.

That was one of the most valuable life lessons I learned while co-authoring a book on coping with the emotional side of cancer. Cancer patients don't want pity. They want to be treated as the viable, vibrant individuals they've always been, even though they may be sidelined somewhat at this moment in time. Therein lies the history. Therein lies the opportunity to enrich the human experience.

Each of us is a storyteller. Each of us is an audience. Each of us is affected by our personal history, the backstory of everyone we meet, and what we've witnessed on the bigger stage of life.

That's History 101 for today.