Tag: resolutions

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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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.

— Moira Donegan, from “My new year resolution? Abandon new year resolutions once and for all” (The Guardian, January 2, 2025)

Monday Morning Wake-Up Call

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“….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)

—  Dr. Wendy Oliver-Pyatt, from “Why it’s time to drop the ‘new year, new you’ BS—and learn to accept yourself” (Fastcompany.com, 12/29/21)

Notes: Calvin & Hobbes via thisisnthappiness & Peteski

New Year

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I pause to check the milkweed, and a caterpillar halts midbite, its face still lowered to the leaf.

I walk down my driveway at dusk, and the cottontail under the pine tree freezes, not a single twitch of ear or nose.

On the roadside, the doe stands immobile, as still as the trees that rise above her. My car passes; her soft nose doesn’t quiver. Her soft flanks don’t rise or fall. A current of air stirs only the hairs at the very tip of her tail.

I peek between the branches of the holly bush, and the redbird nestling looks straight at me, motionless, unblinking.

Every day the world is teaching me what I need to know to be in the world.

In the stir of too much motion:

Hold still.
Be quiet.
Listen.

~ Margaret Renkl, “Still” in Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss

Photo Credit

‘New Year, New You’ B.S. (Hear! Hear!)

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And now for “27 ways to feel bad about yourself while the last piece of Christmas pudding you’ve ‘indulged’ in is still making its way through your intestinal tract…”

As the new year dawns, you’ll notice that without ANY space to breathe whatsoever, what was once a newsfeed saturated with sequins, pints and party platters becomes one bursting at the seams with resistance bands, Nutri Bullets and all manner of “New Year, New You” rhetoric. If that works for you, great. If it doesn’t, keep on reading…

If you find all of this relentless (and, at times, negative) then join the club. I’ve decided I’m over it. I’ve clicked the “unsubscribe” button and it’s incredibly liberating.”New Year, New You” regimes are framed in such a way that they seem motivating, uplifting and encouraging. The reality is they’re designed to sell gym members and juice cleanses at a time when they’re most marketable and we’re most vulnerable. The sheer volume and velocity of this kind of content coming at us from every angle — while we’re still polishing off the last of the mince pies — can make us feel as though we’ve already failed within the first few minutes of the new year.Add to the mix, the pressure of New Year’s resolutions — which suggest that regardless of our current situation, we have much to improve upon; that we need to be better. We’re encouraged to set out a new set of goals, towards which to move to in the hopes of finding what we all want: happiness. We’ve barely finished the last verse of Auld Lang Syne and already, we’re exhausted, defeated and riddled with festive guilt.But here’s a thought: instead of subscribing to what’s become a very tired narrative, this year, let January be yours. (Read Caroline Foran’s 6 tips for moving forward here.)

So, if you insist on resolving to do something, do this: go easy on yourself, be your own benchmark for success. And think about the kind of lifestyle you want to live. Happy New Year.

~ Caroline Foran, from “6 reasons I no longer subscribe to ‘New Year, New You’ BS” (Mashable, January 1, 2019). Caroline Foran is a journalist and a best-selling author of “Owning It: Your Bullshit Free Guide to Living With Anxiety” and “The Confidence Kit: Your Bullsh*t-Free Guide to Owning Your Fear“.

Resolutions. Day 1.

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Today I want
to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold…

– Kim Addonizio, from “New Year’s Day” in Tell Me

Notes:

  • Inspired by Lucille Clifton, “I am running into a new year” (via Read a Little Poetry): i am running into a new year / and the old years blow back / like a wind / that i catch in my hair / like strong fingers like / all my old promises and / it will be hard to let go / of what i said to myself / about myself…
  • Poem Source – Memory’s Landscape.
  • Photo: Frozen Lake Tremblant in the Laurentides region of Quebec. Photo by Timothy A. Clary, Agence France, wsj.com December 24, 2017)