The Morning-After Post

I’m super excited to have been invited to join a blog group alongside three talented bloggers.  Each week, one of us chooses a topic and we all post a blog entry on that topic, usually on Thursdays.   

Here are the links to the other fabulous blogs:

Merryland Girl

Froggie

Moma Rock

This week’s topic came from Moma Rock, who asked everyone to write about resolutions.  Here is my take:

                  Ah, New Year’s resolutions.  Who among us can avoid the promise of a new year?  It’s the ultimate tabula rasa, a beautiful blank slate.  A do-over.  The turn of the calendar is so full of promise, a chance to start anew.  And many people do, or at least try to.  They write out a list of promises, lines of things they want to do or change.  Quit smoking.  Lose weight.  Take a trip.  Take over the world.  Relax.  Whatever.

                  As much as I get why people make resolutions, I choose not to make them myself, for a few reasons.  First, as much as I love a clean slate, when January 1 rolls around, it ends up being just another day – followed by a whole bunch of other just-another-days.  On January 1, I’m not particularly motivated to do something I wouldn’t or didn’t do on December 31, and I probably won’t stop a bad habit I fully embraced just a day earlier.  Hell, I’m usually too tired on New Year’s Day to do – or not do – much of anything.  And, anyway, if I really want to give something up and the impetus strikes on, say, June 6, then I’ll probably give it up on June 6; I won’t wait another six months.

                  Then, too, there’s the staggering failure rate of resolutions.  In her book, Happier at Home, author, happiness guru, and ridiculously thorough researcher Gretchen Rubin offers the following resolution stats:  approximately 44 percent of all Americans make resolutions, but roughly 80 percent of those resolutions are forgotten by the middle of February, six short weeks later.  More disturbingly, people tend to make and abandon the same resolutions repeatedly.  I maintain that at least part of the issue is that people just aren’t ready to commit to the promise they’ve made but they make it anyway, because the calendar says it’s time.  Just because Target puts all of its Rubbermaid containers on sale doesn’t mean that you’re ready to organize your entire house.

                  But a bigger reason I don’t make resolutions is the unpredictability of any year.  Think about your life a year ago – who was in your life, how you spent your time, what you thought you’d be doing now.  And look at your life today.  For the past few years, I could not have even imagined the changes that would take place over the coming years.  My resolutions were useless, almost funny in hindsight, really.  In 2011, I resolved to write more, and so I started this blog.  I did a few months of spotty, silly posts and then – BOOM! – all sorts of stuff went crazy in my life.  Much of it I didn’t want to talk about let alone put it down on paper, so I didn’t touch my blog for a long, long time.  Last year, I told myself I’d try to do more writing in 2013, maybe one blog post a month, and I couldn’t even pull that off . . . at first.  And then I met someone who invited me into her blog group.  As 2012 turned into 2013, I couldn’t have predicted I’d meet my new friend, or that she’d welcome me into her writing circle.  But I did and she did and here we are, a huge change made without any “official” resolution.  Of course, the tide could have turned in the other direction, too, and life could’ve thrown another series of curve balls that led me away from my laptop, resolution or no resolution.  So much can happen in a year, so much we cannot control, and no resolution can ever change that.

                  For those of you who’ve made resolutions, I wish you much luck in carrying them out.  I’d love to hear what they are and how you make them happen (assuming you do).  But if you don’t, that’s okay, too.  When the time is right – and if you really want to – I know you’ll find the strength to lose weight or stop smoking or quit kicking puppies or whatever it is that matters to you.  And, if you don’t, well, there’s always next year.