Farewell to the dreadful list

No more resolutions. Amazing!

No New Year resolutions for me in 2015. I already made some last year, and the year before. As I read about it a few days ago, the reason people don’t follow through with resolutions is that most are very hard on themselves when committing to these changes. People tend to set the bar too high and want to be perfect at reaching it. So they fail once and give up. Another tendency is to phrase them in a negative or restrictive form: stop overeating, quit smoking, watch less TV, etc. Instead of resolutions, the author suggested to nourish an attitude of gratitude. Cherish what you have and celebrate your daily accomplishments.

The first week in 2014 I pledged to post a weekly entry in one of my blogs. Just like the article mentioned, it was a lofty resolution, and very soon I got discouraged from following through. Another resolution was to improve my running time. Overall, I painfully lost almost three minutes in my average 5k runs. In hindsight, it looks like stating a goal is a very successful way for me not to accomplish it.

Here is the catch, though. Practicing gratitude solely will not get me where I want to be. There are these lingering dreams that bug me almost every evening; goals that won’t settle to become unmet expectations. In fact, these aspirations have come up every year during ‘resolution’ time. Giving up is not an option. Neither is writing them up again.

Well, for those of us who fancy celebrating a new year, here it is. Brand new —minus the ten days that went away getting ready for it—. I am immensely grateful to witness its arrival, excited to sense its possibilities, and challenged to take what it has to offer. There is not a resolution list, but there is a renewed commitment with my old goals. Today I celebrate my daily accomplishment, and rest assured that “tomorrow will worry about itself.”