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. […]

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