Resolutions

I never make New Year’s resolutions. Never have. I’ve never understood why people even bother: 99 percent of resolutions made on New Year’s Eve have been broken by 2 p.m New Year’s Day…and that’s only if the person making them has slept in. I consider them yet another exercise in futility, and there are already more than enough of those. But humans are very fond of trying to deceive themselves, and are for the most part very good at it.

So while I’ve not made any resolutions for this year, there were a couple I momentarily toyed with.

1) If resolutions were as easy to implement as they are to make, I would resolve to reverse the aging process and keep going backwards until I reach the age of, say, twenty-one…an age chosen only since it is the age of majority and I’d legally be an adult.

2) I would resolve to be more organized. I am quite capable of returning to my apartment, using my key to open the door, walking directly to my computer, sitting down, getting back up to leave the apartment again, and discover that I have lost my key. It’s a gift.

3) I really wish it were possible to become a better person simply by “resolving” to be one. To be less time-obsessed, more considerate of others, more giving, not quite such a pain in the patoot to my friends requires not only resolving to do it, but to actually work toward that end,, and this is where the resolution process falls apart. I would love to be far more well-read than I currently am. But mostly, I would pledge to be kinder to myself…to be far less quick to fly into rages over my failure to have everything come out the way I want it to on the first, or fifth, try. I would resolve to learn patience.

4) And I definitely would resolve to stop spending so much time bewailing what I have lost and what my physical limitations, and concentrate on being grateful for what is still left to me, and the fact that I ever had those things to lose

5) I would resolve to be less dismissive of people whose opinions differ from my own—but only on the condition that they make the same resolution, so I’m pretty safe on that one.

6) I would resolve to do more than pay lip service to my altruism, and become much more active in the real world and what happens in it. I would resolve to write my elected representatives (of course I would first have to take the time to be sure I knew who they were) frequently, and volunteer for any number of truly worthy causes devoted to stopping global warming and the destruction of the rain forests and end world hunger.

But one resolution I would not make, at any time or under any circumstances, would be to be more accommodating to reality. I have fought it all my life, and will continue to fight it now and forever. I have no illusions as to in any battle between reality and dreamers, who has the physical upper hand. But thoughts are not bound by physical reality, and even after I am gone, as long as my words are stored somewhere, I’ll continue to thumb my nose at it.


Actually, many of the things mentioned above are really very good ideas, and I know I would indeed be a better person for them. So I’ll think about it for a while and, though it’s too late for 2008, maybe next year.

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