No Year's Resolutions

"New Year's Eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; and yet no man has quite the same thoughts this evening that come with the coming of darkness on other nights.”

~ Hamilton Wright Mabie

Happy New Year to my readers/ followers/ friends....shit, 2009 really flew by...time for us all to be thankful for small mercies and get a move on with our lives because time is precious and short.....

It has become customary for people young and old, big and small, of all customs and cultures, to make New Year’s resolutions. We make silent promises to ourselves to drop old habits, develop “good” new ones, to do things that we should’ve done already, to never again do things that we have already done. As the old year draws to an end we all sit in quiet introspection, reminiscing on the memories of the past year, contemplating all the good and bad things that have happened over twelve months, wondering what the new year has in store for us, what trials we may face, what triumphs we may gain, what tragedies we may endure, what blessings we may receive. We then make private vows, personal pledges about how we want to live our lives for the next year. we convince ourselves that, come 12:00 am on January 1st, we will change....but what's so damn special about the New Year?

Well, the symbolism is obvious; the transition from old year to new year is seen as a chance to wipe the slate clean, to start afresh and anew, to put the wrongs of the past behind and look to the future. It serves as the starting point to the rest of our lives. The ritual gives us a time-frame to work with. I’ll stop smoking in the New Year. Come the New Year, I’ll lose weight. From next year, no more reckless spending; time to be a penny pincher. My New Year’s resolution is to stop swearing. I’ll change everything that needs changing, fix everything that needs fixing in the new year....we set ourselves up for a whole lot of change....

The sad thing is, we end up doing a whole lot of nothing. While we look to the New Year's resolution as the perfect chance to make changes, it ends up being the perfect instrument of procrastination. Making a new year's resolution can be downright paradoxical; making a solemn promise to something that we know deep down we aren’t going to do. Resolving to do something is the perfect way to put off doing it, especially since we probably don’t want to do it anyway. How many times have you ever made a resolution that you have actually kept?

To be fair, not all people make resolutions that they don’t intend to keep. Many people make genuine promises that they hope they will be able to follow through with. Some of them manage to keep these resolutions. However, there is nothing to say that these changes couldn't be made at any other time. There is nothing special or magical about a New Year that makes people make much wanted or much needed changes in their lives. The start of a new year is simply a modification to a calendar, the updating of a datebook, the beginning of the Earth’s next complete revolution around the sun.

What I'm saying folks is that we should not decide to make changes in our lives simply because we are entering a new year. A change should be something that one desires for oneself, that one sees as necessary for the betterment of one’s own experiences. That being said, one should be willing to make modifications to one’s life and to one’s habits whenever they are needed. It should not matter what time if the year it is, whether it is New Year’s Eve or next Tuesday, a resolution should not be something that we make as a fashion just because other people are doing it; it should be made because we have a deep desire to make a change in our lives and should be irrespective of time or date. We should not hesitate to make a Summer Resolution, or a July 13th resolution, or any other date for that matter, once we see the need to make a change. After all, life is not a guarantee; we never know if we will even live to see another New Year.....