Perhaps we should abandon resolutions, if only to not make ourselves suffer more. One alternate pledge we might take up as we stare down 2025 might be to forgo the upright vows to spend hours on a treadmill or never eat sugar again, and attempt, instead, something like making peace with our own foibles and failures. This does not require us to stop seeing ourselves for the flawed beings that we are; merely to indulge those flawed beings every once in a while, or at the very least to keep their failures in proportion.
As I head into the new year, I have no shortage of opportunities to catalogue my own faults – and if I forget, there’s a chance some of my relatives will do so for me. But I hope to treat them as I might treat an old friend, one whom I can see clearly and still feel a certain warmth towards. There will be no moment in the coming year when any of us, I or you, are unburdened of our defects. Instead, we will keep on being what we have always been: irascible, messy, stubborn, selfish, lazy, impulsive and alive.
Wait for it! Twilight to Sunrise Time Lapse. 6:00 to 8:00 am. 120 minutes in 26 seconds. 45° F. New Year’s Day. January 1, 2025. Cove Island Park, Stamford, CT.
Don’t miss the sunrise shots from this morning here.
[…] 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.” […]
New Year’s resolutions are penny-ante prayers. You are this way, but you hope to be that way. You used to want this, but now you want that. The assumption behind resolutions is that something must be corrected and improved. One vows to be better than one was the year before.
Part of the nature of resolutions, particularly for those of us north of 60, has to do not only with the new year before us, but also with time already spent, or misspent. We reflect on the years we’ve lived, on the past resolutions made and broken. Another New Year’s Eve come and gone. Every time the ball drops, the heart sinks. You are running out of time, and time is what we value most. […]
Thus there is always a melancholic desperation and urgency when we shout, “Happy New Year!” Will this new year, in fact, be any better than the last? We resolve that it will. We resolve to be fitter, healthier, cleverer, richer, more successful, more popular, more productive, better dressed, happier. And so restarts the whole vain, foolish, inevitably disappointing cycle.
The trouble with all such self-oriented promises is that they deal in chicken feed. What does the great wide world care if you lose weight, or work out, or work harder, or quit drinking or smoking? Quit smoking or smoke three packs a day. Work out daily or let yourself go. It’s your choice, your life. Your little life. Meanwhile, the world — the whole tortured, self-destructive, polarized, endangered, extraordinary world — spins on. […]
“….Why it’s time to drop the ‘new year, new you’ BS—and learn to accept yourself. Once you radically accept yourself and your reality, you are able to focus on what you can control and start moving through life…” (Read full article here)
