Positives

In light of what I wrote last week, I think it's appropriate to mention that Elul is a good time to focus on how far you've come in the last year. Don't just look back on all of the good that you set out to do and didn't accomplish. Focusing on the negative creates an energy of disappointment. And while that may be appropriate for a proper teshuvah and charatah on Yom Kippur, when asking for a kesiva vechasimah tovah from HaShem you must realize whether or not you deserve it. Did you use this past year to your advantage with what you were given? If not, then the charatah is more important, but don't forget what you were able to accomplish and what you did use properly.

Elul

Just an idea that I heard about in shul last week. The Rabbi was speaking about Elul and although this wasn't the point of his talk it was certainly something which I got out of it. He said that you should try to take on something throughout Elul that you know you can keep up for the month and throughout the yamim norahim. You don't necessarily have to do a complete 180 in these next few weeks, but just make it something so that when you get to Rosh Hashana you can say that you have grown. You can say that you have worked on yourself and you have made a difference. If you can do that, you can look towards HaShem and legitimately ask for another year to work on yourself. You can say, "Look at what I did. I accomplished something during this last month. And if You are gracious enough to give me more time and more months, I can use those too to work on myself further." I think this is a great idea for us going into yemai hadin. We will be judged based on how we used our time, and if we can't necessarily show that we used the entire past year wisely, at least we can say we used the last month.

G-d

This past week Yael and I went to the California Science Center and we saw a 3-D IMAX movie about the Hubble Telescope. Needless to say, it was pretty cool. They had these pictures of these stars and galaxies many millions of light-years away. They were probably digitally enhanced at least somewhat, but the basic idea doesn't change with that.
One of the points made in the movie was that in the entire galaxy, Earth is the only planet that science has found with the ability to sustain human life. It's perfectly suited and nothing else comes even close.
In general, I like learning about the universe and creation from the point of view of science and seeing how torah fits in with it all. Dr. Gerald Schroeder focuses on this a lot and I highly suggest listening to him and reading his books. One which I've started is "Genesis and the Big Bang". Anyway, just some suggested reading material.

Excuses

I've had a couple of run-ins with excuses throughout my life, and a few more came this week. Earlier this week I had an "epiphany" of sorts about excuses and a conversation I had this shabbos when I was talking to one of my friends in shul kind of put it all together. He had said that his wife took their kids to New York a little while ago so he had to make sure he got to every minyan on time while they were away so that he could maintain the excuse that getting his kids up and ready in the morning was his reason for being late.
This isn't the first time this week that this occurred to me, but I realized that excuses are really just excuses. They aren't the real reason for something, they are just your way of getting out of trouble. Steven Covey establishes the first of his 7 habits of highly effective people as being proactive in one's decision making. He says that you have to realize you are responsible and that means you are response-able, able to choose your response to any given situation. To use an excuse is to say that you were not in control; you did not have the ability to respond as you chose. And we all know that that just isn't true.
We are coming into Elul this week and we all know the idea that the first step in doing teshuvah is charata, regret. I think that in this day and age that isn't really the first step. The first thing we have to do is make up our minds to admit that we are response-able. We can't go into Elul thinking that things aren't up to us. Feeling regretful for your actions while refusing to acknowledge that you had control over them is not regret at all. You may feel sorry about the outcomes but you don't feel at fault.
Before Elul even begins, and before the teshuvah process starts, make up your mind to realize that every decision you made in the last year was your choice. You were and still are response-able. You made those decisions and you have to live with that reality. Once you can do that you can start to regret the ones that didn't pan out as you would have liked.