Of Course You Should Make a New Year’s Resolution (and it should look like a novel)
It’s a weekday morning. The dog and I are out in the park, making our daily rounds. I’m on the phone with my wife, chatting about the week ahead, whatever’s left of it. What will she be teaching? What will I be writing? What are our mutual household concerns? We’ve been doing this for years, talking during her daily commute and my daily walk as a way of keeping in touch during otherwise bonkers-busy work weeks.
This year, I got an awesome new gig that set a lot of my other freelance work and personal writing aside a bit. Without it being really planned, our Monday talk changed into a weekly report, each of us talking about what we were doing for ourselves, where we stood on various personal growth goals, the kind of things that reminded us that, in addition to being a married couple, we were individuals engaged in a well-being partnership of sorts.
The rest of the week still is for logistical stuff and general housekeeping, but for the last few months I’ve considered Monday my reset day, an opportunity to see where my previous week’s plans succeeded or failed and why. It’ a chance to give myself a little bit of a pep talk, to forgive my failures out loud and make a promise of improvement to myself before a witness.
It’s kind of a primitive compulsion, seizing upon an arbitrary day of renewal and promising to become a different person. Maybe the kind of person who doesn’t need an arbitrary day of renewal for self-evaluation, but I’m not that person yet.
As a journalist and storyteller, it feels compulsory to make at least some sort of annual commentary: “Year in Review,” or “Things to Look for in the New Year” or, the template I’ve chosen this year: “A Critique of/Argument for/Against New Year’s Resolutions.”
I’m in the “for” camp. I always have been.
Although I’ve never done any of them, I’m captivated by New Year’s Resolution traditions: Writing them down and setting them aflame (or hiding them, or posting them), shouting or whispering them at midnight, drawing them from a hat, etc. I’m fascinated by and really attracted to the ritual aspect; like casting a spell, it’s a way to make and believe in our own magic.
Conjuring a better future takes both will and hope, a balance between what you can make happen and what you can let happen through perfect inaction.
Put another way, it’s not about whether or if we need a resolution to change. Rather, it’s about giving ourselves permission to start again. Increasingly we live in a world that doesn’t forgive admissions. People who figure out that they’re wrong and admit as much are either stupid, naive or unreliable. Too often, correcting someone else’s error is an attempt at victory rather than at aid, and mistakes are for exploiting in others rather than learning form. It so often feels like there’s not a lot of room either for admitting or forgiving failure, but that’s kind of the point of this arbitrary renewal.
Unless we’ve injured someone, we don’t need permission to have a fresh start. We only need the resolve to make one and hold ourselves gingerly accountable, like toilet-training a toddler. Failure isn’t great, it’s barely acceptable. But given what has happened we either can give up and live in the shit, or try again. We always have permission to renew our attempt or even to revise our goal. The point is to figure our how we want to be and then figure out how to be that. It’s harder than it sounds, but worth the effort.
The point of it is that there are always more chances to get things right, and whatever reason you have for recognizing that fact is the only one you need.
This year I’m treating my New Year’s Resolution kind of like a book with 52 chapters. I haven’t settled on a title yet. It’ll end up being something like, “Trying Harder,” or “Seriously, This Time,” or “Too Late To Quit, Too Soon to Go Home” with chapter titles like, “This Essay Isn’t Gonna Write Itself,” and “Buy New Pants or Eat Less Food.”
The days are the paragraphs and, if I can hold them all together, I might end up a little more like I aspire to be. Regardless, I’ll keep revising. What else can I do?
