Better New Year's Resolutions

            Hello and Happy New Year’s. Come to think of it, I’ve never posted a New Year’s Day blog before. So here goes. I’m not hung over this morning. The most I indulged in was a double pepperoni pizza from Papa John’s. Nicole and I intended to split a double pepperoni and black olive, her olives on her half, my pepperoni on my half. Well, they got the pepperoni right, but the olives covered the whole pizza. Needless to say, I couldn’t eat the thing and the store kindly brought me a free pizza to make up for the mistake. And we all had pizza happily ever after, world without end, amen.

            As I sit here writing on this first morning of 2013, the tornado alert siren is sounding outside as it does on every first Tuesday of the month for testing, and Delaney is trying valiantly to get me to play with her. This dog has an unerring ability to know just when I’m busy and to get hyper just then. But I wouldn’t trade her in for all the tea in China, though whether or not the tea in China is worth having is a question to which I don’t know the answer at present. Until I do, nothing would be a proper trade in exchange for it anyway. But, to quote Dickens, “the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile, and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it or the country’s done for.”

 

            Yesterday, as a way to prepare, after a fashion, for writing this blog entry about the new year, I looked back over my blog. I expected to find—once I’d collected all the entries together—that I had produced fifty or maybe eighty pages of material. Some of my posts were rather long, admittedly. What I came up with was a hundred and seventy pages and some 115,000 words. Maybe that can just be my dissertation. Somehow, I just don’t think my advisor would go for it. I collected it all together because this year I want to copy edit it. Some of the entries are rather rough-looking in places owing to my less than proficient handling of the web tools involved, and it helps that Blogspot has made changes making it easier for me to use. So I want to clean it up. Is that a New Year’s resolution? Well, it is a resolution at any rate.

 

            My one trouble with New Year’s resolutions has nothing to do with the resolutions themselves. On the whole, the resolutions most people make are well-intended and would be helpful. If most people succeeded in carrying out just one typical New Year’s resolution to its conclusion, most of us would probably feel happier about our ability to set and meet goals. No, I say there’s nothing wrong with resolving to lose weight or do a better job in school or work or with resolving to be a better spouse or parent or friend etc. Nor do I see any problem with making these resolutions at the start of the new year. Years are just there so that we can divide and mark time, after all, and New Year’s Day makes for a good starting point. New year, new plan. I understand.

            What troubles me is how we go about making our resolutions. We usually make them on New Year’s Eve at a party with a glass of champagne in one hand. Then we set about them in January with a will, but by February or late March, we’ve flagged in our efforts. Life intervenes. Taxes come due. Work gets in the way, and we think, “Oh well. Guess I’ll try that again next year.” I see this as such a commonplace pattern because two things are usually missing.

            The first thing missing is a plan. Some people are great at planning, so good at it that they have no idea how to do anything spontaneously. Others are so bad at planning that the easiest tasks are hardest on them if they have to plan them. If you are anything like me, you’re somewhere in the middle. I have no problem with detailed planning, but I also know how to let a day be whatever it’s going to be without my feeling the need to plan it all out. A New Year’s resolution is essentially a goal. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to budget more wisely, whatever it is. When we state our resolutions at midnight, we state the goals themselves. What we forget is that most of those goals take strategizing and careful execution. You want to lose weight? Ok, fine. How are you going to do it. You want to be a better husband or wife? Ok, that’s very good. Where will you start? You want to be a better manager of your money? Alright, where is your money going now, and do you have a monthly or weekly budget? We set goals without making the plans necessary to attain them, and so our New Year’s resolutions often fall flat.

            I said there were two things missing, however. The other thing is the resolve itself. Some would call it the stick-to-itness. Exercising is no fun at all. Budgeting is no fun at all. Maybe counseling or whatever is no fun at all. So we slack off after a few weeks because we’re not seeing any results come March or April. The problem with this mindset is that a year as twelve months long. It may be next December before your goal is realized! Most folks from what I have seen, however, don't consider that there New Year’s resolution may take the whole of this new year to make it happen. Or, they don’t realize that if you really mean it, you’re just as bound to that resolution in September as you were in mid-January.

 

So then, our resolutions should be good ones, things worth doing. But they should also be carefully planned out. I know one of mine is to increase charitable giving of my money. That’s going to require me to do a few things:  to decide how much and when to give, and to whom to give it. Some of it’s purely logistical. If I want to contribute regularly to my church, and I do, then I have to work in an ATM stop at some point to collect the money to do that. That’s not my only New Year’s resolution, but it’s the one I’ll share for today. It’ll require budgeting and planning on my part, not to mention resolve.

 

            I hope your New Year’s Eve was safe and enjoyable. I’m glad to see we didn’t start the new year by diving off the fiscal cliff. Though Congress, in its usual fashion, walked right up to the edge of the cliff and stared out over the abyss before deciding not to jump. I knew they would. I told all my friends and family that we wouldn’t see a deal until December 31, and that’s just when we did see one. Here’s a hint, resolve not to plan your lives the way Congress plans its affairs. You’ll be happier and so will everyone else. Have a good one.