So here’s why people should never make resolutions. Well, one of many, in any case, feel free to add your own.
It’s January 5th, the first Monday of the New Year. I get to the train at the appointed hour, and lo, where usually 30 people are, more than 150 adorn the platform. Transfer from the Red to the Green Line, and lo, a veritable orgy of humanity, teeming along every inch, all with a “you don’t know if I have a knife or not, so best not give me a dirty look, sucka” vibe. Fast forward through the work day to 11:30 am, when I usually go to beat the gym crush, and lo, every good treadmill is already occupied, along with most of the ellipticals and many of the bikes,
All due to people who made resolutions to get to work earlier and work out more. Stupid resolutions.
The basic premise of a resolution is not what’s in question here. Anything that enacts self-improvement should be lauded, applauded, and other words that rhyme with those two. It’s the enforced timing of these resolutions that irks me. It’s a bit like setting an alarm to wake up in the morning. I set mine for 7:20 am, knowing full well my booty ain’t out of bed for another 18 minutes, since it takes me 4 iterations of the snooze alarm to really get me out of bed. I know getting up earlier is “better”, since if for no other reason I could have avoided what looked like the Parisians fleeing their city when the Nazis invaded this morning at the T, but I simply couldn’t be made to do the task at hand until I myself was ready to do it.
If you need to get in shape, by all means, join a gym. But know a decent gym will set you back $70 or so a month, and really, really think about the investment. Factor in such items as new workout clothes, water bottles, the occasional massage therapy, hush money to get the personal trainer to stop posting pictures of you showering on the Internet…these things add up. Go because you want to go, not because a Bally’s ad in December reduced your self-esteem to the point of non-existance because their members' abs seem so toned as to be bullet-proof. And you yourself found a quarter in your belly button last week and wondered how long it'd been there.
If human nature tells us anything, it’s that we as sentient beings can have all the objectively compelling evidence possible and yet will still only act when we convince ourselves a particular course of action is right. Sometimes we concur with the popular evidence, as in, “You know what? I should lose a bit of weight. I should call that old friend I haven’t seen in months. I should look for a new job.” Or your own personal conclusion flies in the face of all known forms of logic: “I think a large pepperoni pizza per meal will melt these extra pounds away. I should call everyone who’s never called me and tell them to f#ck off. I should stay miserable in my dimly lit cubicle until downsized.”
In either case, one and one person alone makes these decisions. The reason most resolutions are not adhered to, thusly, is because all too often they initiate from an outside source, which can appropriate itself into what looks like our own opinion, only to be shattered by the cold harsh light of five weeks later, when you’re flailing like that fish in the Faith No More video on the treadmill in your new $120 sneakers below your $40 shorts below your $18 t-shirt below your $10 headband wondering how in the blue hell you ever got there. And then you go and have buffalo wings and wash them down with 18 beers and wipe your chin with the headband.
In addition, it’s much easier to make an external resolution for one of two reasons: firstly, they are generally more quantifiable. Lose X number of pounds, visit your grandmother X number more times, kill X number more wild boar in the streets of your hometown. You know, whatever. Secondly, they are often easier to make than the more important personal resolutions we should be making all the time, regardless of the time of year. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: we need not give thanks merely on Thanksgiving, need not honor our parents on Mother’s and Father’s Day, need not plant a tree only on Arbor Day, need not kill an indigenous people only on Columbus Day.
These internal resolutions are harder to define, harder to quantify, and even harder to eventually measure. How does one really, say, act nicer? Be kinder? Take more chances? Hard to know. Especially when, in the end, you and you alone establish, maintain, and enforce the parameters of these resolutions. Thus, the temptation to hedge the rules, redefine them, or outright break them is avoided only through your own personal brand of willpower.
Because, after all, you can’t truly share an internal resolution. It’s a bit like trying to share an intense emotion…even if the person is by and large empathetic, there’s still a singularity that isolates you from those around you. You can’t get a group of friends to pool the amount of personal growth you’ve made the way friends can pool together to, as a group, lose 100 pounds. And this is not to belittle those who take external, measurable resolutions and see them through---heavens no. But in the end, the external can at most supplement the internal resolutions that make their external counterparts possible in the first place.
In the will, in the spirit, in the desire---that’s where all resolutions are made or broken. One simply cannot be forced to enact a resolution. We can utter the words, surely enough. Maybe even convince those around us that we mean business. But if your heart’s not in it, well, it simply isn’t going to happen. You heart/will/animus is completely and ever at odds with inertia and stasis. The two wage war consistently on a unique landscape that is each and every one of us. There are battles that are won and lost simply by our desire to win or complacency to lose. Both emboldening and terrifying, this fact. All depends on what you think of yourself.
Your resolutions, then, come down to nothing less than self-esteem. How to value yourself. How your goals measure against that self-worth. A person who tries to lose weight due to self-hatred may lose a few pounds, sure, but will probably yo-yo right back. A person who loses weight because he/she thinks enough of themselves to get healthier will, by contrast, generally be more successful, unless in a ill-times fit of optimism go for a jog and get hi by a bus. They won’t lose any more weight. The good news is that they won’t gain anymore, though, I suppose.
Self-esteem applies to internal resolutions as well. Say the resolution is to not spend another New Year’s without someone to kiss. One could of course take the short-cut and hire a hooker that night, but let’s not analyze that particular option for this particular exercise. For Low-Esteem Larry, we find a man desperately avoid the perceived negative state of singledom. Larry doesn’t get many dates. He often scares the ladies away. Often he’s maced. Now, let’s turn to High-Esteem Harry. Harry generally beats them off with a stick, which if meant literally would land him in jail, but metaphorically means he’s being chased because he has enough confidence to prize his self-worth to the point that he doesn’t force himself upon the masses. And for that, he get mucho smoochies.
OK, Larry and Harry are oversimplifications, to be sure. In the end, the “One to Grow On” of all this lies in how the perception of self plays a central role in any life-altering resolution we make, be it now or 6 days/weeks/months from now. It’s like Tony Kushner said in “Angels in America”: the world only spins forward. Even if we like who/what/where we are, nothing is even truly stagnant, and that’s a good think. Look at standing water, for instance. Major eww there. We evolve or we rot, pretty simple really.
As for myself, I’ve made an internal and external resolution in the past few months, which have been slowly evolving themselves. The external resolution is the “Wading in the Velvet Book”, hopefully available around Valentine’s Day for your purchasing pleasure. Screw flowers---send 112,000 words of indulgent prose instead! As for the internal…well, that’s making stuff like the book even possible. Spinning my heart forward faster than I thought it could, but there you have it. Not only a new sense of self, but by and large a new self to sense. Good stuff.
But that’s for a later time. I resolve to tell you all about it sooner rather than later.