Keeping New Year Resolutions
Looking at the word Resolution differently
We’re over two weeks into the New Year. How many of your resolutions have you broken?
Me? Not any, yet. I say yet because there are still 50 weeks to go and I find it hard to make new habits. To help me become more disciplined this year, I decided not to make the usual resolutions of lose weight, exercise more, yada yada yada. I committed this year to seriously look at the word resolution and choose what is in my power to resolve. Not an easy task, but for me, a necessary one.
With all the upside downs and inside outs of the last two years. I am weary from the pandemic madness, politicians, and the fears that have invaded our minds, and upset our lives. I need a new, different better, year.
With a change of year peeking around the corner, I wanted the promise that the word new held. I didn’t realize how prophetic those words, a new year, were going to be. On December 26, I lost my only brother. He was ten years older than me and suffered from Parkinson’s. This disease slowly ate away at who he was and what he loved. The last year he was the brother I didn’t know anymore. He had no control of his body which amounted to many falls, and injuries. He could no longer answer his phone, work a remote, cook, hold a book, or most painful of all, give up golf.
While I will grieve for many months, years over the loss of one of the finest people I knew, I take comfort in knowing, he is in a better place now even though that means my life and the lives of his wife and children are now different.
Today, another change happened in my life. A late Christmas present arrived at 7:15 this morning. Eight pounds of beautiful fur scampering about on four paws was delivered to me.
Already, the year is still fresh and change, probable upheaval until he is trained has arrived.
So what does this have to do with the price of tea in China?
It’s made me rethink that word resolution and its partner word resolve.
We make resolutions because we wish to make changes, either to ourselves, our lives, our business. We tell ourselves we are:
Going to join a gym
Lose weight
Become more productive
Take up a new hobby
Read more books
And the list goes on.
In realty, we join a gym and go for maybe a month constantly, then we begin to slack off because changes are happening fast enough.
We change our eating habits and see a little bit a weight loss but Valentines and chocolates, not to mention nights out with friends, undermine our hard work and determination.
We buy everything we need to pursue our new interest only to find it means craving out time to master it. (10,000 hours of oractice it’s said.)
We buy books, they pile up. We start changing our habits at work, see some increase in our accomplishments may be even some decrease in stress levels, then we slip back into our old ways.
I am guilty of all of these things. That’s why I chose to approach the new year differently.
Resolution, according to the Oxford dictionary means, a firm decision, the resolving of a problem. Always before I spouted off ways things I wanted to accomplish, not things I need to resolve with in me. To make this year actually different that the last two meant I had to pick the things I need to to fix within me and resolve to make changes that were beyond superficial words.
This year my New Years resolutions include:
Putting others before myself
Putting myself in their shoes
Finding one good thing in every bad happenstance
To be more aware, not only of my words but my tome and inflections.
To think first, speak second
To become more committed to my writing and stop taken this gift for granted.
My brothers death reminded me we have no idea when our light will be snuffed out. Each day is a gift to us, one we need to make the most of.
There are things I wish to get accomplished in this new year, losing a few pounds would be welcome but not doing so doesn’t change me nor does it affect the my year. Making me a better person, now that’s a goal that if I achieve it, then I can say this has been a better year and I have become different.
You can make all kinds of physical changes to yourself but that doesn’t always improve you as a person. When you resolve to work on your insides, your spiritual, emotional, being, then lasting change occurs and it feels good. When that happens, things fall into place and come together. The things you resolve to fix, fix you and a year that look like it’s starting off wrong somehow gets on track.The positive changes you make to your insodes helps it stay there. Life always improves when it’s on the path.
Resolutions , a word that offers hope and promise at the beginning of the year, can become our biggest improvement project. Its up tp each of us to decide how seriously we want to take that word.
A New Year can begin at anytime, not just on January 1. It’s all about being ready to change and commit. Are you ready for your new year to begin? Do you resolve to change your inner self or are you content with sticking to the phyiscal vows you made already and will probably break?
