(HOST) This year, commentator Deborah Luskin resolved not to make any more New Year’s Resolutions.
(LUSKIN) I used to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the accepted and conventional manner. I’d stay up till midnight, fortify my resolve with champagne, and vow to live cleaner, work harder, and sustain a calm, orderly, life. I’d make these resolutions at midnight, and in the morning – just hours into the new year – I ‘d break them. And then I’d think I was a failure, and that the year was off to a bad start and could only get worse so really, why bother? It didn’t matter if it was a modest resolution I’d failed to keep, like putting the clean laundry away, or a grandiose one, like writing a novel by the end of the week, or a perennial one, like losing a few pounds, or a hopeful one, like being kinder and more generous.
The first day of the New Year wouldn’t end before I’d eaten something I’d forsworn the night before. By the end of the first week, I’d fall behind on Chapter One, and I’d despair at the housework that remained undone. It’s taken me a long time to figure out that New Year’s Resolutions are too often just a recipe for self-loathing, and I’m quite capable of that without a special holiday whose purpose, it seems to me, is to insure disappointment and dissatisfaction.
So I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions any more, and I no longer stay up till midnight. This year I was recovering from a stomach bug, so I barely ate and I didn’t drink. On New Year’s Day, I woke up rested and sober and ready to address the tasks of the day.
January is the morning of the year, and I associate mornings with optimism and promise. Every morning presents another chance to get things right – or at least get things done. Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I make daily plans. It helps that I’m a morning person. I like to rise in the dark, let the dog out and the cats in, and rekindle the fire. While I write, the light shifts, night lifts, daylight creeps in. By the time my husband has brewed the coffee, I’ve already put words to the page. And the day is off to a good start.
On any given day, I have more to do than I can possibly get done, even if I were efficient, which I’m not. Writing – especially writing fiction – seems to require that I spend a fair bit of the day staring out the window, as if the words I seek will appear at the birdfeeder, with the chickadees. So even on good days, I never finish my work; I abandon it – knowing full well it will be there when I return to my desk the next morning.
In the past, New Year’s resolutions have deceived me into chasing after a perfectable me; nowadays, I dispense with the resolutions and simply get on with whatever it is that needs to get done.