My Last Resolution: No More Resolutions
By the time you read this, it will be 2020 and I wish you the happiest of New Year’s. I am writing this early in the morning on the last day of 2019 before I head out to train. I am ushering in the New Year without pomp. I am doing the sorts of things I do on an ordinary weekend, but with the intention of setting a tone for 2020. Two thousand nineteen was an exciting year for me filled with change and growth. It was not without its hard decisions, heartbreak, and failures, too—which makes sense. Over the course of the year things change and people change. Life happens. Change inevitably happens.
And it doesn’t just happen when the clock strikes twelve and the calendars get set back to January 1. It doesn’t just happen during January and into February when we see folks sprint out of the gate chasing their New Year’s resolutions. It happens regardless of whether or not you want it to. It happens all the time.
We can harness the energy of intention behind change at any point in the year. And for me, setting those intentions based on the calendar doesn’t really resonate. It feels forced. My mother says, “I made a resolution years ago not to make any New Year’s resolutions, and I am keeping it.” I always liked this. When I was in college I adopted this outlook and removed the obligation to lose weight and find true love come January 1: misdirected goals that hadn’t been truly considered but just reflected my yearning to feel worthy of love. What I wanted was a life of abundance, to know my inherent worthiness as a human, and to feel worthy of love every day of my life. Laughing along with my mother, I made my last resolution over two decades ago: no more New Year’s Resolutions. And the person I have become without them feels a great sense of abundance and worthy of love. To get here took work, but I did it without promises of a new year, new me.
This is not to poo-poo on resolutions. They may work for you and I am a big fan of people selecting their own tools for wellness. But I want to offer to those folks, who feel a bit like the New Year’s version of the Grinch, some space in this environment drenched with ways to find New You in the New Year. I want to let you know where you are right now is okay, too. You don’t need to make any promises right now to yourself or others because change happens regardless of the date.
I would also like to offer a different practice for the New Year, or new moon, or new shoes, or new Wednesday—you know, your new whenever. On holidays, I like to take stock in how far I have come since the last time I took stock, rather than think of all the things I would like to change in the future. I like to periodically make space to appreciate what I have and what I have done. From that positive place of abundance, I continue to grow and change without fixating on a “new me.” Regardless of the year, I have always just been me. Maybe it’s because I am a memoirist, but looking at how far I have come seems much more fun, not to mention empowering, than looking at how far I think I need to go.
So perhaps, the next time you do something significant or come across a date that is important to you, you can look back on your year or some other significant amount of time, using your calendar, journal, photos— however you like to document your life, and take stock in what you gained. If there were failures, what did you learn from them? If there was loss, what did you gain from it? Maybe it was some perspective. Maybe time or space. Have you have progressed toward a larger goal? Can you identify some milestones on the way? And of course, if there were more obvious successes and achievements, celebrate those, too. Start the New Year looking at how far you have come, and all that you have, rather than what it is you want to change. Change will happen regardless and now it can happen from a resourced and abundant place.