Everything is subject to diminishing returns under the sun. If you keep making New Year Resolutions and your lifestyle reset to default after only a few weeks, it only makes sense that you’ll get tired of making such Resolutions. The motivation with which people made Resolutions have died down in recent times. Now, basically, everyone is in the “I’m just there”, “let’s see what happens” mood.
We all know there’s very little difference between the last day of the previous year and the first day of the current year. In other words, if you were in debt, were broke or stupid, you probably still are. Nothing has really changed in your situation. The only major difference is that the majority of the world has agreed that it is a new year. The fizzles of new year Resolutions die as the year goes by, and our behaviour resets to “factory settings”.
Some even say that there’s nothing new about this year. Nothing shows that anything has changed. We all decided that today is the new year. That’s all! Some people even use a different calendar and to them, it may not be a new year. An example is the Chinese, whose New Year will fall on February 1st.
Is there a need for Resolutions at all?
Of course, there is. “You’re under no obligation to be the same person you were 5 minutes ago”, Alan Watts said.
However, many miss an important step preceding resolutions: evaluations. At the end of every year, every institution holds an end-of-year meeting to calculate their profits. They evaluate their actions and decisions to determine what they did right – so they continue – and what they did wrong – so they re-strategize.
Let’s all pretend like it’s just a new year like we already are. It is necessary that you self-evaluate. The days go by too fast for daily self-evaluation. After every month, however, self-evaluation will let you know if you are on track with your life goals or not. The year evaluation serves as a bigger picture to see the results of your minute actions and inactions. After the evaluation, re-solutions are made to make the most of the current year. So it’s rather systematic, not built on feelings of motivation and hyper-energy.
If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there. If you don’t define what success in life means to you and how it will look like, you wouldn’t have a yardstick to determine how whether you’re on the right path or not. It’s easy to know how far you’ve come because it’s all in the past. And oh!, how well we know our past. It’s the future we are all uncertain of.
As you have already heard time and again, the best way to predict the future is to create it. Evaluate your life. Know where you want to go. Re-evaluate your life with time to know if you are on the right track or not. Make Resolutions to keep doing what is right and quit doing what is wrong. This is the purpose of Resolutions.
Small Steps Everyday
Understand where Resolutions are in the equation, and it will be simple for you to make them and keep them. “What if I fail like I did last year and the year before that, and the year before the year before that?”. If there was no failure, there wouldn’t be any need for Resolutions. Know this and know peace. So when you fail, don’t restart. Continue!
Just as we “pretended” that today is a new day of a new year, you can pretend that each day is special to you. You have each day you awake to resolve the pitfalls in your life. Each day is a new year to do good, be good and live good. Remember, it is the individual trees that come together to form the forest. It is the little drops of water that make a mighty ocean.
