New Year’s Resolutions

It’s good to make resolutions even if we don’t keep them. At least we care enough to try and then when we feel bad for not following through we are motivated to try harder or at least make more resolutions. If we didn’t feel guilty we wouldn’t have to make them in the first place. Back when we still smoked cigarettes we quit every New Year only to start again in a few days or a week at the most. Then in 2000 we finally did quit but it was in March and not related to a New Year promise. There is a good chance that all those false starts were good practice and helped reach the final success.

Every day we make a list of things to do yet we rarely finish, that is a miniature version of the annual resolution process. There is a list for the week ahead and another for this Month and even one for the next. All those lists are full of things that got rolled over from the previous list so it is standard procedure to not get everything done. The same thing that happens in our personal life shows up at work where we make promises that will not be fulfilled. Why do we play the game when we know it will never be finished? It must be fun for some unreason.

Two years ago I made a new year’s resolution to not make any more new year resolutions but I failed to keep it and accidentally made another one last year that I also failed to honor. So I figured if all resolutions fail anyway, then the real solution is to make a resolution not to keep any resolutions. So now if I fail, it will be OK and if I succeed that will be OK too. It's a guaranteed win\win even if I lose\lose.

Most resolutions are based on regrets from last year. Some resolutions are promises to stop doing something bad like smoking while other resolutions are promises to start doing something good like losing weight but if they were such good Ideas why would we wait and only want to do it once a year? We say we are making a promise for the next year but what we really want to do is erase the past so we can feel good again. Instead we should erase the future so we won’t keep repeating mistakes like making resolutions that can’t be kept.