It's that time of year again. Time to line up and make your New Year's Resolutions! I recently received an email that was sent around the office asking what we're going to resolve to fix about ourselves this year. There was spending more time with family. Losing weight. Quitting smoking. Helping others more. And, conversely, more ME time! This was a benign email and in the grand scheme of things, I'm confident that the author's intentions were good. And yet, I couldn't help but have the knee jerk reaction of how dumb resolutions are in the first place.
My choice for New Year's Resolution this year is none of the above. New Year's Resolutions are tragically flawed endeavors and they set the person doing them up for failure, which then sends them into a terrible downward spiral leaving them worse off than when they started. Most dieters eat more, most smokers smoke more and most bad people are bad people more often. It is my opinion that the New Year's Resolution should be abolished and that people should start thinking about taking personal responsibility on an every day basis, not because it's a new year and it's something cute to talk about at work, but because it's something they WANT to do. If you want to lose some weight, get some exercise and eat a little better. If you want to quit smoking, you can do it any day of the year. It doesn't have to be January 1st for you to try to better yourself. Most things that people try to do are not easy. Quitting smoking is not easy. Losing weight is not easy. Changing any personal (or professional) habits you have are never easy propositions. The problem with the resolution is that about two weeks in you allow yourself the loophole where you say, "eh, it's only a resolution. Screw it." Then you go grab three double cheeseburgers from McDonalds and smoke a Parliament for desert. If you're just the kind of person that likes three double cheeseburgers and a Parliament, I'm not gonna judge. Your life is yours and yours alone. But don't be a hypocrite. Don't say one thing and do another. That would be like me ending this post with a resolution. Which I will not do. Because this year, my resolution is never to make another resolution again. Wait....
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3 comments:
i can just HEAR you saying this.
and i'm with you, i don't make resolutions.
mostly, though, because i am fabulous all year and i don't need to change anything.
okay, that was a good one.
It's interesting to note, though, that life’s enlightened rationality, transformative spiritualization, and interpersonal identities intertwine, if not wed, to time’s dimension. And although we take no special note of the calendar’s daily churning, we stop to acknowledge the occasion when the 365th begets the first. What better time to take stock of our sometimes directionless, worrisomely meaningless, life than on this occasion. For those who claim to be above the fray, get over yourselves. Many a resolution winds up on the ash heap of history, but the human desire to renew and rededicate is as old as human existence. For as long as humanity has aspired, it has kept count, or track, of our celestial orbit. Life is circuitous and, thankfully I think, cyclical. Were it not, we would be no better for having been. To learn is to repeat. We are surely not moving inexorably forward, untethered to the all that has come before. I am human so I resolve . . . to fair better than before, to enrich what was wanting, and to find meaning in the vacuousness that preceded.
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