I’m beginning to wonder if it isn’t
better to have the same new year’s resolution for each year of your life. It’s
all those painfully specific goals that’ll really bring you down. And who needs
that? Maybe we all just need to think more generally: I want to work harder; be
healthier; connect more significantly to my God; be more informed; I want to be
the person my dog thinks I am. These are achievable resolutions. And they don’t
run out. They can always be pruned and nurtured and refined (I mean, let’s face
it, it would be impossible to ever fully achieve the last one anyway.) Maybe
instead of being a mere year’s resolution, it could be an entire life’s goal,
so that at the end of the year, I mean, the very last end of the very last year,
you could look back and think, “some years were better than others, but yes, I upheld
my resolution.” It would be a lot more inspiring than looking back every
December 31st and realizing that, no, you in fact did not lose 47 pounds on
your new home treadmill, go on a four week, juiced-only core-cleansing diet, or
pilot a private jet owned by Donald Trump. (Of course, if your resolution is to
unjustly over-tax your rich neighbors so that you don’t have to worry about
your negligently acquired house being foreclosed upon, then scrap everything I
just said and go right on resolving yearly, because apparently, despite our
founding fathers’ resolutions, you’re working).
To be honest, 2012, for me,
meandered away like a seaside, dirt path. No backward glance, no last hurrah,
not even the gentle a-whooshing sigh of a closing gate. And it was not tragic
for me to let it go. The year was a humbling one for me. I fought many a demon,
related to work and home and family and self, not all, or even most, of which
have been conquered. I got blessedly through what was, hands down, the worst
experience of my life. I acquired a set of grown-up worries that I'm not sure a
person can ever truly shake, no matter how much resolution she has. I survived
a birthday that pushed me closer to 30 than 20, and managed to be grateful
about it. But 2012 was by no means a bad year. On the contrary, it showed me a
hundred, million times over how wonderfully blessed I am. I got to see my
sister, my best friend, marry the man she loves. I got to sit in the warmth of
my parent’s home and watch some of their dreams take shape. I fell further in
love. I met Dahlia, the beta fish. I saw the ocean. I got a job, complete with
a salary and a handful of beautiful, relentless students who have no idea how
clueless I am. I picked on the banjo. I ate lots of sushi. 2012 ended on a
high, and, really, it was kind to leave so gently, to leave so much room for
the potential of an amazing 2013. I am not the type of person who thinks new
year’s resolutions are lame and useless. In fact, I have the annoying tendency
to make new year’s resolutions on a semi-monthly basis, so that not only do I
not accomplish all of them, I also forget many of them ever existed. But I am
also the type of person who borrows worry, unwittingly, but perseveringly and I’m
of the opinion that it simply doesn’t do to add guilt onto the ever-growing grown-up
list of things-that-nag-at-you-in-the-night’s-witching-hours. So my conclusion
is that it’s not so much the end-result that matters. Not that last look on
December 31st, not the purchase of the super sexy skinny jeans that – in your
triumph - no longer make your ass look like the swamp-emerging snoot of a hippopotamus.
It’s not even the resolution itself that’s most important. What’s important is
the resolve. What’s important is the ability to dream and the conviction to
think that a mere dream is important enough to aspire to. What’s important is
the intrinsic motivation, the valiant effort. What’s important is to not make
yourself sick over your inadequacies or the inadequacies of your life, not to
build yourself up for perfect failure. But rather to somehow, through all that
resolving and hoping and aspiring to take on the new year with a conglomeration
of humor and confidence, contentment, inspiration, and healthy restlessness,
certain in your uncertainty that what you do know can get you through what you
don’t, what you can’t do can be built into what you can, like the feeling of
standing, ankle-deep in cool sand looking out across the wind-buffeted sea,
stomach-, heart-, head- full, rigging in hand, certain you could quite easily fail:
crash and burn, extravagantly, or quietly, uninterestingly find your sails in
irons, whichever you least prefer. But certain, also, that it is quite possible
that you won’t. And that that’s what makes it all so maddeningly, wonderfully worthwhile.
-R.E.A.
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