Alex Goes Off! - "Revolving Resolutions"

by Alexandra R. Yaremko

A column in January about New Year's Resolutions. What are the odds? Probably close to the odds any resolutions you make this year are similar to, if not the same, you made last year. Take both bets. Unless you have resolved not to make resolutions, like the old joke about giving up Lent for Lent, your resolutions are probably the same.

New Year's Resolutions are supposed to mean to resolve to do some things differently, resolve to make changes for the better. We know what better entails. That's why year after year resolutions lists are full of AMA recommendations: lose weight, quit smoking, exercise.

It doesn't matter what the specifics of your list are. Some how New Year's Day has become "the big Monday," as in "I'll start Monday," full of resolve, of course. So why is it, year after year, resolutions lists are chock full of same-old-same-old. Been there, haven't done that. If a resolution is so important, important enough to put on a list, why didn't you do it last year?

How can you explain a to-do-list that just doesn't get done? The "big Monday" thinking of New Years may have something to do with it. Like all "I'll start Monday" decisions, there is always another Monday. Who actually makes a decision to start something on Monday and follows through to Wednesday. This is a rhetorical question because no one does. If it's important, you do it now. If it's important to you and it's Thursday, you start on Thursday. As Apollo Creed told Rocky in whatever Rocky movie that was, "there is no tomorrow." In other words, there is no Monday; there's only a Thursday.

The "to-do's" of your New Year's Resolutions aren't important or you would have done them last year, you would have done them last Thursday. Which is fine, just admit they aren't really important to you. Maybe you think the goals that go on your list are so important, even potentially life changing, they have to be on a New Year's list in order for you to get them done.

But if New Year's Resolutions/"big Monday" thinking isn't working for you, and if you have the same resolutions on your list as last year, "big Monday" isn't working for you, maybe you should resolve to rethink resolutions. Have that one thing on your list.

My friends and I pick a motto to run with in order to spur on the resolutions. A few years ago the motto was undaunted. Undaunted became shorthand when something came up during the year that one or the other of us did not want to do. As far as resolutions/to do lists go, the motto/shorthand/bumper-sticker philosophy worked. Last year, we couldn't decide or agree upon a motto. "Just Do It" was a little too pithy, even for telephone conversation shorthand. And "Get In, Sit Down, Shut Up and Hold On," wasn't always applicable.

Did we still cross things off the New Year's to do list? I don't remember having a list last year because we couldn't get past the motto. Not that it mattered. The list would have been the same as the year before. This year we picked our motto in December, or the "big Monday" equivalent of Thursday. So far, so good. Although, "stop living life according to bumper-stickers" won't get done.