Don't Assume I'll Make Resolutions This Year

I admit it: I have mixed feelings about the urge lots of us have this season. Yes, the threshold of a new year often rouses in me a normal desire to better myself. I too am prone to get more serious about tweaking a habit I have or circumstance I wrestle with.

But sometimes not. As to this year, I’m not sure yet about resolutions. I mean, I’ve experienced a remarkable go of this past 2023: a daughter getting married in our back yard in April, my wife and I celebrating our 45th in the Canadian Rockies, me retiring from parish ministry, to say nothing of an invitation to spend months in Princeton as a seminary Visiting Scholar. Oh, and did I mention we just decided to move back to Nashville? Like this spring, assuming the closing on the house we bought there goes through? All that is to say nothing about the stresses on our souls from the suffering and the desperate conflicts on the world scene.

So I could be excused for wanting, more than anything, to take a breather. Make that take a breath. I don’t feel bubbly, overflowing mounds of motivation to experiment with life hacks and trendy self-makeovers. Maybe I shouldn’t.

Besides, in my teaching and preaching over the years, I’ve, well, let’s just say I’ve taken jabs at so-called self-help books or grumbled about celebrities who lay out best-selling steps to a new you.

For there is the problem with what one blogger calls “the futile hope that you will get better at something just because you want to.” Resolve and willpower as forces for real change register less impact than we usually think. No wonder something like 80% of people give up New Year’s resolutions within the first few weeks of the year. I don’t want to repeat a futile exercise.

And I think about this: is it sensible to believe that you can change in a few weeks habits that were decades in the forming? Our real challenges rarely seem tidy or subject to easy fixes.

Lest I sound jaded or harsh, I think of Chris Wheeler, writing at mbird.com, saying he loves the idea of resolutions—who wouldn’t, he muses, want not to get better as a husband, father, writer, human? “But,” he confesses, “I also know how long a year is. I’ve been spinning around the earth’s axis long enough to know that my motivations are tilted, my will is eclipsed, and my abilities are gravity-bound.”

And I think of a mistaken attempt to substitute mere hopes for habits—daydreamy intentions instead of real, even if only incremental steps.

So Jonathan Rogers, in his email/blog The Habit Weekly, reflects, “A resolution is something that happens between your ears. A habit is something that happens in your life. The right kind of habits create healthy grooves that your life can run in—grooves that align with Reality (and, therefore, productivity, joy, peace, rest, etc.).”

Ah, that makes sense. Concrete things I lay into place? I’m warming to that.

So maybe here are a couple of things, more or less modest, I think I can take on:

Practicing more gratitude. I am, after all, writing a book on simple, honest, unfussy prayers, one of which (along with Sorry and Help) is Thanks. Nothing fancy there, but something attractive and, if you even just leaf through the Psalms, see at once as downright biblical. Here’s a habit that can create the kind of healthier grooves Jonathan Rogers was mentioning. And just yesterday, I found this gem of an article in the New York Times by Catherine Price, “When the World Feels Dark, Seek Out Delight,” and I loved the prospects she lays out for paying attention more to life’s delights (what many of us call blessings): Noticing things that spark delight, she goes on, is also a form of what psychologists call savoring, the practice of deliberately appreciating positive life experiences.” The word savor has its own appeal. It just seems right. But it’s also good for not only the soul: “Savoring has been shown to boost people’s moods as well as counterbalance our brains’ natural tendency to focus on the things that stoke anxiety and fear.” I’d love to do more of that. So I’m clear that I need to set aside time, perhaps each day, to turn heavenward a simple “Thank you.”

But resting in gratitude for what is isn’t all I’m envisioning. I’m seeing also:

Getting more attentive to possibilities that may wait around the corner. Here I’ve been helped by Suleika Jaouad, author of a 2021 memoir, Between Two Kingdoms. In her email newsletter she talks not so much about resolutions, as reflective questions. She’s big on keeping a journal (as I am) but even without that tool, I see value in asking questions like, “What in the last year are you proud of?” (In my own life, as you can imagine from the accounting above, there’s much to pause over and ponder.) And then, she suggests, lay out answers to “What did this year leave you yearning for?” I’ve got some thoughts there, and more to explore. If 2023 was a full year, it was also a clarifying one.

And, in an intriguing last question for journaling or reflection, Sukleika has me ask, “What are your wildest, most harebrained ideas and dreams?”

Ha! I have some thoughts here, too—about a big move to another state coming up, old friendships to rekindle, old haunts to reinhabit, but also some ways I’m dreaming my writing will find some new readers, might flourish with new fruit. Wild, harebrained ideas? Maybe not. But hopes and dreams worth looking toward? Praying about? That resonates.

For the goals here are not all about merely me, what I can do, how I can manage some new feats of willpower. I’m not talking obsessing over dreams and high-octane intentions. But I also don’t plan to let slide, for lack of my own sanctified unfolding and watching, some possibilities the new year might hold.

Tim Jones