Tag: Habits

New Year. New Me.

Live & Learn28 Comments

[…] Many of us are familiar with the experience of making New Year’s resolutions to boost our physical fitness, get on top of the to-do list, save money, be less irritable around the kids and so on. What keeps us from accomplishing those things is rarely a lack of self-discipline, or needing a more efficient system for building healthier habits. More often, it’s the very attempt to make sweeping changes—to “become unrecognizable,” in the parlance of contemporary self-help—that stands in the way of a different, happier and more meaningful life. […]

The truth is that the appeal of a “New You” doesn’t have to do with exercising more, making more money or accomplishing any other concrete change. Rather, it’s about obtaining a sense of security and control over life. With a new year beginning, we want to finally feel that we’re in the driver’s seat when it comes to our health, finances, personality traits and so on. We want to rid ourselves of the feeling, so vividly described by the English novelist Arnold Bennett, that “the years slip by, and slip by, and slip by, and that [we] have not yet been able to get [our] lives into proper working order.” […]

Buying the equipment and watching the tutorials—or, to confess my own particular weakness, drawing up beautiful schedules in overpriced notebooks—all help fuel the feeling that control lies just around the next corner. By contrast, actually making a change in your life, here and now, requires the surrender of control. It demands that you exercise for 20 minutes today, even if you don’t have the best running shoes, with no certainty that you’ll enjoy the experience or manage to turn it into a long-term habit. Maybe you’ll never do it even once again. Who can say? […]

Really, though, life as a finite human is better understood as piloting a little one-person kayak down an unpredictable river. We don’t get to know what’s coming next—when the peaceful or challenging or terrifying periods might arise. Everything rests on our capacity to navigate from moment to moment, making the best decisions we can, and not allowing ourselves to be disheartened by the ways in which our journey doesn’t exactly map the plans we might have had for it. In this situation, the only action that really matters is the one you take right now.

Indeed, the very notion of “New Year, New You” crumbles under examination. By definition, the only person who could ever engineer a New You would be Old You, with all his or her familiar issues. In trying to erase our past selves, we become like Baron Munchausen in the old German stories, who tried to drag himself out of a swamp by pulling on his own hair.

Freedom lies not in this futile struggle to become someone else but in consciously accepting who we really are and starting from there. […] Instead of “becoming unrecognizable,” the New Year should be a time to commit to what I like to call “radical doability.” […]

Read more here.

— Oliver Burkeman, from ‘New Year, New You’ Doesn’t Work. Here’s How You Can Actually Improve Your Life. Instead of resolving to become a different person in 2025, try setting achievable goals and embracing ‘radical doability.’ (wsj.com, December 28, 2024)

Image via Freestocks

we have an unstoppable will to go forward

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PS: It’s like every time i get pushed down and crushed, I seem to get more information…Parkinson’s had made me aware of time. Like, really aware of it. My sense of mission, my sense of this is what I’m supposed to do, that got much stronger in me. If I don’t do that, I start to think about “Oh, Shit, this happened to me.” “What a drag.” You know, it makes life harder. Then you go into this whole pity party thing. It’s a complete waste of time.

JH: Do you ever get into that zone, the pity party zone?

PS: Yeah, I get in it all the time, but I’m very fast at getting out of it. […] Because the whole premise of this is we’re not gonna win every time, we certainly can’t be perfect, we can’t control it, but we have an unstoppable will to go forward… Basically its the same goal, which is, “Schmuck, take action, no matter how frightened you are.”

— Phil Stutz & Jonah Hill, from Stutz, (Netflix, 2022)

Notes:

  • Lori suggested that I watch. I’ve watched it front to back 3x. Powerful.
  • Stutz: Rated R for frank language. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix.
  • NY Times Film Review: ‘Stutz’ Review: An Actor’s Tribute to a Therapist. In his documentary, Jonah Hill gently turns the tables on the famed Hollywood psychiatrist and author Phil Stutz.

Lightly child, lightly.

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When we examine our thought stream with mindfulness, we encounter the inner sound track. As it plays, we can become the hero, the victim, the princess, or the leper. There is a whole drama department in our head, and the casting director indiscriminately handing out the roles of inner dictators and judges, adventurers and prodigal sons, inner entitlement and inner impoverishment. Sitting in a meditation class, we are forced to acknowledge them all. As Anne Lamott writes, “My mind is like a bad neighborhood. I try not to go there alone.”

When we see how compulsively these thoughts repeat themselves, we being to understand the psychological truth of samsara, the Sanskrit word for circular, repetitive existence. In Buddhist teaching, samsara most commonly refers to the wheel of life. On this wheel, beings are reborn and subject to suffering until they develop understanding and find liberation. Samsara also describes the unhealthy repetitions in our daily life. On a moment-to-moment level, we can see our samsaric thought patters re-arise, in unconscious and limited ways. For example, we see how frequently our thoughts include fear, judgment, or grasping. Our thoughts try to justify our point of view. As an Indian saying points out: “He who cannot dance claims the floor is uneven.”

~Jack Kornfield, The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology

Notes:

  • Quote: Make Believe Boutique. Photo: Patty Maher with She danced among the trees
  • Prior “Lightly child, lightly” Posts? Connect here.
  • Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.”

13 days in. New Year. New Me.

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funny-new-year-resolution-tweets

Source: themetapicture.com

Let’s face it, New Year’s resolutions are venomous things.

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Carroll-Jonathan-13

Let’s face it, New Year’s resolutions are venomous things. You make them, you break them, you feel lousy, you forget them. But if your bent is masochism and you insist, I recommend reasonable things that are not hard to accomplish: This year I resolve not to drink furniture polish. I resolve to give away all my patent leather. I resolve to pet as many dogs as will permit me.

I once resolved to give up cigarettes but then realized they were one of my oldest friends. As one grows older, we need all the friends we can get so forget that resolution. Likewise drinking. I have never liked to drink so I don’t, but I refused to give it up on numerous occasions for a New Year’s resolution because who knows — one day drinking might come in handy and then where would I be? You have to be careful about these things — life is long and pleasure is short and too often life wins.

If a gun were pointed at my head today and the man in the black cape announced, “Make a resolution or die!” I would grudgingly say, “This year I will try to be kinder, more patient, and as generous as a baby with a cookie.”

The problem with resolutions is we know ourselves pretty well and know if we ain’t doing it now, we probably won’t begin on January 1st. I guess the best thing to do is start in immediately but make no promises to yourself or anyone else. Certainly not out loud. We can make lists and resolutions all day long but the doing is what matters and that can begin any day.

– Jonathan Carroll

Jonathan Samuel Carroll, 65, was born in NYC and has lived in Austria since the 1970s. He is an American fiction writer primarily known for novels that may be labelled magic realism,slipstream or contemporary fantasy.