Re-striping a tiger

New year resolutions and the challenge of change.

Here we are: in the infancy of 2014. So I thought I’d kick off the new year with a “new year resolutions” post.

But before I begin, let me clarify that this isn’t yet another article telling you about switching to low-fat, non-dairy creamer or taking time to, like, smell the roses and just, y’know, live, man! This post goes out to the “new year resolutions are lame” people. It’s a backlash to the backlash, in other words.

For as long as I can remember, the beginning of a new year got people talking about their resolutions for the year ahead: what they wanted to change, the new things they wanted to try, the ignored laundry list of self-improvements they wanted to tackle with renewed vigour. It was a time to take stock — to review the 365 days that had passed and look forward to the next 365 with renewed purpose.

However, it’s a pastime that seems to be going out of fashion. Now every January, it’s more common to hear people deride new year’s resolutions as a pointless exercise in futility that’s destined for failure once the shine has worn off the “new”.

But to be honest, the more I hear this, the more it bugs me. Why? Because, at the risk of over-simplifying, what they’re essentially trying to say is:

“You’re probably going to fail, so why try?”

In an effort to temper our “new year zeal” with realistic expectations, we’ve kinda missed the point.

The high failure-rate of new year’s resolutions demonstrates the difficulty of change, not the futility of making resolutions.

An article got me thinking about how our behaviour can be shaped and cemented in our formative years, particularly our high school years — and why it can be so difficult to change. It’s a long article that’s worth reading, but I’ve excerpted the bits that stood out to me:

If you’re interested in how people become who they are, so much is going on in the adolescent years…

For many people, [this is] the high-school experience in a nutshell: At the time they experience the most social fear, they have the least control; at the time they’re most sensitive to the impressions of others, they’re plunked into an environment where it’s treacherously easy to be labelled and stuck on a shelf.

Maybe, perversely, we should be grateful that high school prepares us for this life. The isolation, the shame, the aggression from those years—all of it readies us to cope. But one also has to wonder whether high school is to blame; whether the worst of adult America looks like high school because it’s populated by people who went to high school in America.

High school itself does something to us, is the point. We bear its stripes.

- Why You Truly Never Leave High School [New York Mag]

In short, our past shapes our present more than we probably realise or care to admit. But, while I understand the lingering impact of real (or imagined) trauma during our formative years, I also believe there’s a fine line between empathy and excuse.

This article shows that we’re willing to revisit our potentially-unpleasant past to uncover “why we are the way we are”, yet once we’ve successfully identified the cause… we opt to use it as a scapegoat to justify our behaviour rather than resolving to change.

A wise Oprah once said, “When we know better, we can do better”. Our life isn’t a murder mystery where the credits roll after we find out “the butler did it with a candlestick in the library because Colonel Mustard stole his lunch money.” We have to stick around and face the repercussions, whether we want to or not.

The well-worn cliché is that “a tiger can’t change its stripes” and we accept this wholesale as a convenient excuse not to change. But the problem is that we confuse analogies with actualities: yes, we can be like tigers in this sense, but that’s not what we are.

In other words: old habits die hard, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be killed.

The difference between . and ?

Once upon a time, we started out every year surfing on a wave of personal improvement. Then as we were repeatedly smashed against the rocks of reality, our courage was diminished until we ended up standing on the shoreline watching others ride the waters.

We shouldn’t let our desire for personal improvement atrophy with age.

After describing a seemingly-implausible trick that he’d like to successfully perform someday, renowned pickpocket, Apollo Robbins adds something that resonates with the issue at hand:

Robbins laughed. Then he inhaled and let the air seep out through his lips. “Some people say, ‘Well, that’s impossible,’ ” he said. “But I don’t think so. Do I know how to do it yet? No. But I’m working on it.”
- A Pickpocket’s Tale [The New Yorker]

Some see the impossible as a full-stop, while others see it as a question mark.

Don’t resign yourself to “I am the way I am”. Strive to be a better person — if not for yourself, then for the long-suffering loved ones around you who put up with your garbage.

Whether we succeed spectacularly or fail fantastically, I hope 2014 is a year that we start working on “it”.

Anyway, that’s the end of my old-man rant.

Now get off my lawn.