I’ve never kept a New Year’s Resolution before.
Except my recurring one to eat more pizza. But that was easy to keep because I’m attracted to pizza and when I eat it, my brain shouts YASS Queen, and my taste buds say more, more, more.
Do you think my brain and body reacts the same to a resolution to spend quality time at gym across the street from my apartment, where the equipment smells like stale sweat and all the personal trainers eyeball me disgust when I attempt to do a sit up?
No.
Resolutions are things that are hard for us to do. They require us to change our behavior and spend less time tossing and turning in bed and more time facing the monsters that are doing the Tango underneath our bed.
They call for us to change.
They call for us to do less of one thing and more of something else – and that requires a lot more oomph than we may have inside of us right before a new year swings by.
You know when I make those BIG changes in my life?
When I’ve had enough.
When I’ve eaten more carbs in a week, than a person should eat all year, and now I have to walk around town with the top button of my jeans undone and my shirt hanging outside of them.
Or after I’ve found annoyed with how many times I’ve made the same mistake, lost a relationship over the same reason, or went to the dentist and rolled my eyes, this time at myself, for not flossing.
This year, I realized after months of making eye contact with a brand new monster in my life, depression, that I was sick of feeling so..soo….so many things, and I needed to do something about it. Of course it wasn’t that easy. Of course I spent months feeling so low, and feeling so frustrated as I watched myself unable to do things that I once enjoyed so much. I waited a long time to make a change to feel better, but I didn’t wait until a new year to decide to do anything about it.
Resolutions aren’t something you can magically set and change on the last day of the year. They are things you work on when you’ve had enough, when you realize that you’re living half as great of a life as you know you’re meant and capable to live.
To tell you the truth, our lives don’t change just because it’s a new year. They change everyday we decide to do something different. What we resolve to do, we hardly do and that’s because those things are the scariest, the hardest, the things that we toss aside because it’s easier to toss & turn in bed & scroll through our phones than take the first step toward our personal to-do list.
So I resolve to do nothing, except that when I’m fed up with myself or made another giant mistake, that I take myself out for dinner, go for a long walk, call a good friend, and figure out how I’m going to make one tiny change in myself, right then and there.
So here’s what I have for you. May your new year be filled with lots of “I love you’s”, brilliant mistakes, and wild bursts of baby steps! I hope whatever it is you’re working toward – now & forever – you remember to just never give up.
On the last day of 2017, I plan on dirivng with the windows down, the radio on loud, and closing my eyes, and thank the universe that I’m still alive and as well as I can possibly be.
Happy New Year to you, my dear friend, and not the person you resolve to be.
