Year-Long Resolve

At the beginning of the year, people seem compelled to analyze their lives.  They look at their choices and their actions in the past year, and they make promises to themselves to do better, to be better.  In the interest of learning a bit more about what kind of things people resolve to do, I looked up a page of statistics on typical New Year’s resolutions, and this is what I found.  Forty-five percent of Americans usually make resolutions.  The most common, according to my source, is to lose weight.  Others include spend more time with family, spend less and save more money, get organized, quit smoking, and help others.  Only eight percent of people succeed in these resolutions, while twenty-four percent fail every year.  On the other hand, people who explicitly make resolutions are ten times more likely to reach their goals than people who don’t.

I have to admit that I’m one of the latter.  I’m an observer in the great game of New Year’s resolutions, and I do think it’s that, a game.  In my experience, people don’t usually take them very seriously.  Certainly it’s a nice idea, to have a period of time once a year when people are thinking about self-improvement.  But I also wonder if it’s a bit of a cop-out.  When people fail at their goals, they can say, well, there’s always next year.  They have an excuse to put off making the change.

I don’t think we should parcel up our lives so very much.  Time is really just numbers and dates, squares on a page.  Everything I did and learned in 2012 is still with me, still just there over my shoulder.  I want to keep it with me as I move forward into this year, and I want to continually, every day, resolve to be better, stronger, wiser.  Maybe, if I keep making my resolutions all year, they’ll begin to stick.