Senior Moments: Making resolutions

I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I have piles of memories of being handed black-and-white internet printouts that asked grade-school me to list the top three changes I wanted to make in my life. My class would spend 20 minutes discussing how we were going to eat more vegetables, do the dishes after dinner and finish all our homework as soon as we got home after school. The papers were then collected and tacked up in the hallway, where we could stare at them and guess whose was whose while waiting to go to lunch or lining up for a trip to the computer lab. Then, on the first school day of February, the papers were plucked from the walls one by one, and our resolutions died in the recycling bin.

My whole life, that’s more or less how school has conditioned me to view New Year’s resolutions — something half-heartedly made after brief consultations with your friends that lives somewhere in the back of your mind for a month, then is completely forgotten with little to no consequence to your daily life. I just remember my second-grade mind getting stuck on the “Why now?” factor. It didn’t make sense to me that I needed to make a change in my life just because we had hit a specific day on the calendar. I wanted to make my resolutions on a random Thursday in June. I’m not sure if this is everyone’s experience; it’s very possible I was just a poorly-disciplined child.

Looking back, it’s not surprising each of my resolutions fell through, even as I got older, and they became more about changes I actually wanted to implement in my life. There was, and still is, a lack of motivation to pursue these goals throughout the rest of the year. Big dates like the New Year shake us out of our everyday lives. We’ve just had the holiday season and everything that comes with that disrupting normal schedules of work and school, and it’s easier to look at something like exercising every Saturday morning or learning to crochet or switching to a diet entirely consisting of salads or red meat or chocolate, and think, “Yes, this is something I could do.” Once we get back into the swing of real life, things like that can fade into the background. I know even small goals that have been a part of my routine for ages get completely forgotten when I’m drowning in homework.

When things get especially busy, I feel guilty for dedicating time to those small things, when what I should be doing is writing that looming paper or studying for any number of tests. We’re told to set checkpoints toward things we want to add to our lives, but we’re not often applauded for doing the things necessary to meet them. We don’t want to let our resolutions become a disruption, but isn’t making a resolution just a recognition that your life needs some kind of positive disruption?

This year, my resolution isn’t going to be another new task or box to check — I have enough of those already. This year, I want to give those small goals and resolutions time to live and grow in January and every month after. This year, I don’t want them to die in February.

Mia Timlin is a senior at Notre Dame Regional High School. She's lived in Cape Girardeau for five years and loves reading, dancing, watching movies and listening to music by the Beatles.