Break if you must
Notwithstanding the best intentions behind them, New Year’s resolutions, as it is often said, are meant to be broken. I’ve never subscribed to making resolutions all my life, thus I could not care more if those made by other people are well-forgotten by March.
That’s not me being mean; just my way of saying I’ll be the last person to begrudge or tease another about missed targets that affect me. In the same vein, I’ve never had a need for those planners, especially those you get by completing Starbucks stickers.
I’d like to think that life-changing decisions should be made with bold strokes — free-spirited — and not at all guided by day-to-day entries using ink on paper. That’s too tedious for someone who’d rather grab the bull by the horns as it charges.
Take the usual resolve to start eating right and hitting the gym the moment the Yuletide festivities are over — after all the savory food and sweets had been eaten, and after emptying those bottles at parties or during moments of introspection nursing a drink.
Drinking alone, I can’t remember who said that, is but a manifestation that you’re already an alcoholic. Okay. Let’s trudge on.
Year-end promises end up as promises, rendered unachievable not for lack of trying but maybe out of a wavering resolve to see them through. Probably, an issue with goal-setting, of being bombarded early on with that mantra, “aim high and surpass the mark.”
How about setting realistic goals instead, bite-size pieces to leisurely munch on instead of swallowing one pie too big for the swallowing? That could work or, if it does not, at least the disappointment would not be of gargantuan proportions.
Let there be no mistake with all these musings. It’s nice to be looking forward with a matching planned course of action. That’s being proactive if you anticipate what the coming days or months or years may bring in.
But any attempt to look through and prepare for what the future holds may be served well by looking back at the triumphs and failures — big and small — to savor or learn from them. That’s what sentient beings do; that’s what separates us, rational beings from God’s other creations, magnificent as they all are.
As much as we can only prepare for 2023, there are many things from 2022 and before it, 2021 and 2020, that we may draw strength from, including in finally getting out of this pandemic that has changed our way of life.
How about someone we know who, having embraced the anti-vaxxers’ position, is now deathly afraid of resuming in-person work after two years of working from home? What future would there be for him who does not want to take public transportation again to be at the office — the real, not virtual one?
Would he be waiting for the world to reverse its rotational direction? Wouldhepresent himself to be
Ayn Rand’s
John Galt who said he’d stop the motors of the world and did so, too?
But instead of that famous
Atlas Shrugged question, “Who is John Galt?” the better question to ask is, “Where is John Galt?”
He’s nowhere else but here, 1 January 2023, the start of another year. Now, go write that New Year’s resolution. Just don’t force me to read them.
I’d like to think that lifechanging decisions should be made with bold strokes — freespirited — and not at all guided by day-to-day entries using ink on paper. “Year-end promises end up as promises, rendered unachievable not for lack of trying but maybe out of a wavering resolve to see them through.