The confetti has blown away, and it's time to clean up. It's always tempting to view the beginning of the new year as an opportunity to shake off the bad mojo, wipe the slate clean, and hope for a fresh start. Now that 2013 is in full gear, many of us probably came up a list of resolutions in an well-intended effort to leave our past flaws behind. Some of us, however, are rather reluctant to set ourselves up for failure.
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| A Little Too Busy To Be Making New Year's Resolutions |
For 2013, I could have made a New Year's resolution to give up Doritos, but seeing as how I've eaten Doritos every night the last fourteen consecutive days, I see no need to highlight my own personal failures.
Humans tend to be creatures of habit. Very few of us quit things cold turkey. If we've spent a couple years smoking or eating Doritos or just being fat in general, a New Year's resolution is likely just the tip of an iceberg, the proverbial first step of very very many. As a kid, all of my habits were still laboratory experiments that I could turn off when I needed. That's how I stopped biting my fingernails and being afraid of the dark. But decades later, the habits I have retained all my life are now second-nature. It would take much more than a day that comes around every year to turn the U.S.S. Dorito Monster around.
New Year's resolutions are really about one thing anyway: gym memberships. I know because I spent most of New Year's Day sitting on my fat butt and watching TV. And during this time, I was subjected to an onslaught of gym commercials urging me to get off my fat butt RIGHT NOW!
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| HA HA -- Still Sitting On My Fat Butt and Loving It |
Like every red-blooded American, I over-ate from November to New Year's Day. Miraculously, I did hit the gym sporadically during this period, but in that final homestretch to Christmas and NewYear's, there was only one lane left for sprinting, and yes, it was the lane was full of holiday food.
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| Finishing First in the Fast Lane of Food |
Making a New Year's resolution basically puts your biggest weakness under the stress and tension of a rubber band. And rubber bands love to snap. Google "New Year's resolutions," and you'll find a vast amount of information about how you're going to ditch your resolutions by February. But it's the New Year! We all feel that we need to do something.
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| Stretching the New Year's Resolution Until February |
What we can do is at least try to make a few little changes. Rather than "resolve" to do a drastic about-face, just tweak the knobs for a minor adjustment in the right direction. Reducing the speed of the locomotive is much more doable than slamming on the brakes. This year, I will not resolve to give up Doritos because I love myself and Doritos a little too much to put us through that inevitable train wreck. But I can try to eat fewer than a hundred chips in one sitting and who knows, maybe even skip a night here and there.
For me, there is no special magic wand waving on January 1st. It's like any other day except a little worse thanks to those guilt-inducing gym commercials. The New Year isn't anything more than a New Day. And guess what, we get one of those, well ... EVERY DAY!
So Happy New Day to all of you! Good luck on all of your minor adjustments!
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