Begin Again. And Again.
Well, it’s a New Year and a new you. That is, if you are a New Year’s resolution person. And if you are, that means you’re also an optimist. About 75% of those who make resolutions will keep them…for the first week. It goes downhill quickly after that. If you’re older, you’re even less likely to keep a resolution. I’ll let you decide what older means, but either way, good luck! Most of us will still accidentally be writing last year on our checks long after the resolutions have been broken.
Even if you didn’t know the New Year was arriving because of the TV specials, or because the ghost of Dick Clark visited you in a dream, you’d know by the TV commercials. The fitness cartels come at us from all sides every January. The diet gurus flash “before” and “after” shots at every break. They know we’re in a weakened state. They know we ate too much between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They know how hopeful we feel as we watch Father Time lumber away and Baby New Year toddle in. If it seems like every other advertisement is for Jenny Craig or a gym, it’s because they are.
Weight loss is the most popular pledge in the New Year, but we make, and consequently break, a whole host of other resolutions too. We might pledge to limit our gossip, until we just can’t sit on a particularly juicy bit of news. Perhaps we insist we will call our mother more often, with the oft-related resolution to not let the accompanying criticism get under our skin. When the latter doesn’t work we abandon the former. Sometimes we promise ourselves we’ll start reading non-fiction books instead of those dystopian novels we love so much, although some of those plot lines sound similar to what’s in the news lately.
I think that we play this game because of the promise held by a new year. We literally get to turn the page and start over again in our planners, and we have a sense of how much we’d love to do that in real life too. For most of us, it’s not that we don’t like ourselves per se, it’s just that we have an idea of who we are that may or may not match reality. We’re not really as old as we look in that photo, are we? We’re not going to weigh his much forever – that’s why we keep all those clothes we can’t wear anymore! In those moments when we recognize the gap between our self perception and our reality we are sitting ducks for a free first month and squeeze bottle at Planet Fitness or the first week of free “chef inspired” food by the numbers. If only it were that easy.
I’m not saying New Year’s resolutions are bad; I think anything that makes us healthier or smarter or nicer is worth pursuing. But I do think New Year’s resolutions are somewhat arbitrary. The more short-lived they are, the more they make us feel bad. It’s too easy to break a resolution. Most of us rarely give ourselves permission for failure. If we fail, we’re done. And once we fail, we often lack the motivation to keep going. So how do we alter our behavior and change our ways when it is so easy to fail?
St. Benedict (who I’ve mentioned before) had some words of wisdom along these lines a long time ago: “Always we begin again.” It was his way of acknowledging that we often fail. When it happens we don’t beat ourselves up or fall into despair. Instead we simply acknowledge that we need to begin again. I didn’t mean to eat the whole pizza; I’ll only eat half next time. I haven’t run in a month; I don’t need to run for miles, just a few minutes as a first step. I’ve let my prayer life slip away; I won’t be able to sit in meditation for thirty minutes every day, but I can talk to God right now.
New Year’s resolutions are usually too grand and too fragile. So skip the New Year stuff and just determine what is important to you and decide to begin doing something different. You don’t need a new you; just be who you want to be. Tell yourself you’ll be successful, but also admit from the start that you’ll fail at some point, and commit to beginning again when you do. And if Dick Clark does visit you in a dream, remember that he’s the patron saint of beginning again, and again, and again. He might be trying to tell you something.
