Resolution Fulfilled

In which we reflect on having actually accomplished the goal of being able to blog at will, and then choosing not to without feeling bad about it. Also in which we try out a rhetorical structure heretofore hypothetical. Godspeed, me, because I'm pretty sure we actually need to publish this one on time.

I am typically not a sincere celebrant of the New Year holiday. I have found it to be a particularly arbitrary way to choose an event, the rolling over of a calendar date's biggest category. To me, a larger digit's change is no more meaningful than an odometer showing many zeros at once for a fraction of a car ride. It is still only one day since my yesterday; midnight is just another hour. The tenth-mile wheel does not even pause as it passes its own zero.

I also have had little use for resolutions. As much as I have tried to follow this tradition, I have also internalized popular culture's mockery of people failing to follow a plan to change their behavior. On this ritual I have alternated: some times sincerely trying to change, some times doing nothing and guaranteeing failure, both in secret to avoid (observable) shame. It also seemed foolish to me to hold self-improvement as a once-per-year activity. If you stumble in your effort to quit smoking then waiting a year is a terrible idea. That is making the annual holiday an excuse to NOT change, regardless of whether it's done out of foolish hope for an unlikely outcome or fully-aware but pedantic, bad-faith sandbagging.

I feel differently this year. I think I can appreciate the rare moment, and commit to improvement, and not suffer the bad combination I described above. In fact, I think that contradiction is great! I think I honestly prefer to sincerely like New Year's Eve rather than to hold some vain, blasé disinterest. I look forward to sharing my resolutions and to having others' shared with me.

And I realized this preference just today while sitting and taking stock of my Fall season. Not even my whole year.

Holiday Spirit

I've also never been a big fan of Christmas, or of my birthday. Both might be due to a minor tragic accident of timing: I'm a Capricorn.

The notion I associate most with this circumstance is how unfair it is to the children who suffer it. I don't recall feeling too affected by it myself, but I don't trust my own accounting of my childhood traumas. I think I associate it more with kids whose birthdays are nearer or actually on December 25th. For them, the wording "cruel trick" floats in my memory. I don't know if I'm quoting my mother on that, but it seems like her kind of phrase.

The meaning being: a kid's birthday is meant to be special and just for them. Christmas is for everybody. Those are mutually exclusive. But since both occasions involve giving presents, those unlucky kids often get gifts that loosely try to cover both bases at once. There's some factor in there about how you can't give a kid a life-changing gift twice in one week. Kids born in July can have their dreams fulfilled twice a year, but not the late December babies. For them, you have to pick which event is disappointing. You can't even give them one "big" gift, because then they only get half as many special events. Lose-lose-lose.

I remember hating Christmas, and I don't remember liking my birthday that much. Presents didn't do it for me. Giving them was terrible. At least on my birthday I got a delicious carrot cake that never had any onions snuck into it.

This year, as my wife put it, was "probably our best Christmas ever". We didn't give each other any important gifts. We went shopping for stocking stuffers, contracted a mild case of Covid-19, and only had to attend two family gettogethers out of a sense of obligation.

Sadly my son suffered the cruel trick. His birthday is between mine and Christmas. And he had to watch his cousins open presents while he sat there lamenting the gift-wrapped box in his lap labeled "do not open until...". I doubt that gift will be worth the wait. I guarantee it did not benefit from being delivered a week early so it could taunt him. I guess the giver doesn't plan to see him on his birthday, which is a helluva holiday greeting.

100% of that story was an analogy about special occasions being mis-used. We technically gave the kid a present on Christmas, we just didn't let him participate in the opening. We gave him a birthday gift as well, two-for-one! But we won't wait around to make him feel special on the specific day. Twice as efficient as actions, zero fulfillment of the goal.

I see New Years the same way. If you only try to improve because the year is changing, you're improving too infrequently and will probably fail anyway. If you only feel special on your birthday, then the rest of the year must feel bad. And if you only give people Christmas gifts as date-driven obligation, which it usually is if we're honest, then we suck at giving gifts the rest of the time and probably also on Christmas.

The Optimism

The reason I've come through this feeling good about New Years: other people doing it wrong doesn't mean that I have to do it wrong. My family had a good Christmas. We'll celebrate people on their birthdays. And this new years I get to reflect on a whole year of progress.

I spent my year methodically working on multiple individual goals. Progress was not steady by any account, but it was consistent in its inconsistency and for once I was paying attention to it. And finally in the Fall I set down specific ideas that I wanted to accomplish before Winter arrived. I finished none of them, and I am very happy about that. Because they are not things that are to be finished, but things to be progressed indefinitely. Unlike handing an unopenable wrapped box to a child and claiming to have "accomplished" a birthday, I've set about trying to make effort. Not some shallow "resolution", but a sincere attempt to change.

I like to link back to one of the first posts I put on this blog, in which I embedded a hilarious tweet about building a blog platform instead of blogging (here). That was about two years ago. This will be only my eighth post in those two years, and there was a gap of almost 15 months in the middle. I didn't even pretend to post a January 2023 resolution to write more.

And yet! I claim I've successfully become a writer in that time. I learned before I ever started this blog that I didn't really care about publishing articles. I've never stopped writing them. Publishing them is a challenging exercise too, and I've put effort into that challenge also (last article). But it's not the point.

AND MORE-SO! I think it's misleading to say I've "become" a writer. I have improved substantially at doing writing. I know this with certainty. My progress has waxed and waned, but the overall outcome is obvious to me. And I have notes to prove it! I've only "become" in the sense that I am more a writer now than I was before I built myself a blogging platform. Successfully enabling myself to publish when I so choose, I might add!

My intent for the next year is to do more of the same. Not in the sense of repeating some token promise that I don't intend to keep. I intend to continue to want to improve and to know how far I've come in the journey. That's way better than quitting smoking. I get to take this specific moment as a celebration of the past and an expectation of the future. That's MUCH better than an annual reminder to start exercising more.

But like that article that doesn't yet exist, I'll have to elaborate on exactly how I've tracked my progress some time in the future. This one is too long, and I need to go spend a genuinely wonderful night in quarantine with my loved ones.