Our lives are littered with dead and dying New Year’s resolutions. It’s a disgusting and depressing sight, like a party room on the morning after, when the banners, balloons and festive food have been replaced by sticky beer bottles, cigarette butts and a few snoring, drooling drunks.
Over in one corner of any average psyche cowers a bedraggled old liar sniveling, “I will lose weight, I will get fit, I’ll take control of my finances!”
In another corner squats a delirious dope chattering, “I s-swear I’ll s-swear off a-alcohol and c-c-caffeine.”
Nearby lies another bum, clutching another frayed hope and hissing, “This year, god@ $% it, I’ll be a kinder and more patient person!”
So much determination and anticipation, so much belief in the possibility of a noble, healthy, impeccably organized existence–and every year these dreams go sour faster than a jug of milk.
Knowing all this–that the typical New Year’s resolution has the life span of a New Year’s Eve bash–the New Year’s cynic refuses to make any resolutions and mocks the fools who do.
“New Year’s resolutions?” snipes the New Year’s cynic. “Why bother? No one keeps their resolutions. New Year’s resolutions are a joke without a punch line.”
At this point, the cynic is apt to chortle, blow cigarette smoke and, through a hacking cough, add: “Most people couldn’t even tell you what they resolved last year. Not only do they not keep their resolutions, they don’t remember them as long as they remember the day’s newspaper horoscope, which is about 37 seconds.”
The New Year’s cynic believes that compiling a list of New Year’s resolutions is a masochistic exercise in self-loathing and self-denial. A resolution, in the cynic’s view, is the fancy name we apply in the new year to the failures of the year before.
“Do I really need to remind myself of all the things I failed to do and be last year? ” the New Year’s cynic scoffs. “For that kind of torture, I’ve got my church, my therapist and my family. I mean, if I resolve to lose weight this year, what am I really saying? I’m saying I didn’t lose weight last year. I’m saying I was a total pig last year. I’m saying that I’m embarrassed that sometimes I eat chocolate chip cookies for breakfast. Why should I be embarrassed by my eccentric joie de vivre?”
At this point, the cynic will swig Chardonnay from the bottle, cough again and sputter, “Resolutions are the straitjackets in which we punish our natural impulses.”
In the cynic’s view, New Year’s resolutions are just for show, a magician’s sleight of hand, a flimsy facade on a tragically weak will.
Resolve to lose weight come January and you immediately feel so much thinner you allow yourself that extra doughnut. Resolve to give up beer and you’re free to have one final guilt-free binge, or several.
Real resolve, the cynic argues, doesn’t come gussied up as a New Year’s resolution. It occurs independent of the noisy, hungover, arbitrary deadline of Jan. 1.
“Resolutions,” sneers the cynic, “are the opiate of the masses, or at least a marketing scheme by health clubs.”
Many of us wrestle with our inner New Year’s cynic this time of year. He makes a seductive argument that New Year’s resolutions are a waste of time. But he is wrong.
Sure, we could make resolutions in April or November, but it helps to have the extra nudge of January, the encouragement of a clean calendar, the community of other resolution-makers. And even resolutions broken are better than resolutions never made.
Resolutions are like travel magazines. They take you exploring, if not in flesh, in fantasy. Resolutions invite your mind to roam into exotic places, places you imagine would make you happier than your usual locales. And if you tantalize yourself long enough with your imaginary wanderings–into the foreign lands of health, wealth, knowledge, wisdom, calm–one day you might actually take one of those trips.
Will you ever take them all? Probably not. But just as you can’t take a trip until you can imagine it, you can’t act on a resolution until you make it.
The cynic would call this dreaming. So?
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