RSSFriday B.S.: The final results of discussion, writing and negotiation are resolutions
Jan 02
Humor Attitude, New Year's, Resolutions Comments Off
I turned to my friend the other day and said to him, “You don’t do New Year’s resolutions, do you?”
“No,” he said, with a what-are-you-stupid? laugh.
I admire people who can live so freely, taking each day for whatever it’s worth. But he’s not totally free of course. He pays bills and works full-time and waters the plants and washes the dishes. Just things that need to get done, whether he values the doing or not.
Still, there is something for being said for not feeling pressured to lay down a series of steps for self-improvement at the beginning of the year. After all, resolutions are things that didn’t go so well last year with the expectation that they can be improved upon. What really sets my friend apart, what is really amazing, is not that he doesn’t have the expectations that things should result in a certain way, but that his confidence is so high that it will all work out one way or another. That seems like a worthwhile attitude to carry you through.
It might surprise you, but as a general rule, I actually think that things tend to work themselves out no matter how much energy, time and heartache we put into them. It is in the doing that gives things meaning, not so much the results.
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The problem with that philosophy is I am a processor. I like to think things through. As I get older, that compulsion to think through the steps of any particular action has become more overriding than is probably healthy. But I can’t help myself. I literally have to weigh the pros and cons of everything, from when to go to the bathroom, what to make for breakfast, whether to stop at the package store after work. Which direction to park my car (I’m fond of backing in). Who do I need to e-mail today (priority goes to someone who e-mailed me most recently). Even whether to write this article. Every decision becomes a multi-step process.
I can’t help myself. Even thinking about New Year’s resolutions was always a wrenching process. It was not just identifying possible resolutions, it was categorizing them and prioritizing them and then deciding whether the goals were achievable, whether the results were desirable and by the time I was done, my resolution became to actually make some resolutions.
On Monday, another friend of mine e-mailed me and asked what my goals were for 2009. The weird thing was, I had an immediate answer. There was no process, no weighing, no deliberating. So when it came to 2009, my resolutions were set before New Year’s Eve. Now that is something.
I don’t know how I did it, I don’t know if I had already been thinking through the question on some subconscious level and it was just a matter of verbalizing my response. Or maybe I have finally learned to unclench and let things flow whichever way the stream takes me and the answer just came to me. That is the guy I want to be, a laudable resolution in itself, and bastardly difficult to quantify. But here’s the thing, it’s not the result of becoming that guy that will make so much the difference, it’s how I get there that gives the resolution its meaning. So whether its dishes, or writing an article or publishing my first book, I just need to get the ball rolling. The result will work itself through one way or another.
