I’m all for New Year’s resolutions.
Equally: new month’s resolutions, new week, new day, new hour.
It is eleven am on a Saturday morning. I have faffed around since nine. At eleven, I made a new-hour’s resolution to write this. I am now writing this.
There is satisfaction in allowing some of the energy of the resolution to unbuckle me from the loop-de-loop of faff, to solve that most fundamental of existential questions: “What to do, what to do, what to do? Or even better: what to do now?” [C14: from Latin resolvere to unfasten, reveal, from RE- + solver to loosen; see SOLVE]
What would Jesus do? I haven’t a clue. What would a better-version of myself do? That, I tormentingly know. It is this better, more organised, intelligent, seasoned version of myself who makes all the resolutions, leaving the me-as-I-am to have to carry out his “Fix Yourself” diktat.
I think Miroslav Holub’s Brief Reflection on Maps is a good rejoinder and explicator to those who go “why bother” (I am one of those why-botherers, by the way).
It is for those who go:
“It’s futile. What you promise yourself, what you resolve to do will necessarily unravel through the inertia of willpower.”
“Why do you need a ritualistic date on which to draw a line? A line which says: from hereon in, I’m doing it like this, not like that?”
“I’ve tried in the past. It didn’t work. I’m giving up on the trying’thing.”
What does the poem say to all this? For me, it says: we absolutely need maps. We need our plans, statements of intent, objectives, Holy Grails, and (New Year’s) resolutions.
And, here’s the rub, it really doesn’t matter if these maps for future action completely make sense, either as comparative benchmarks to what other people are doing (“Stop making sense, Steve!” - thank you Dave), or as definitive goals. What does matter is that these resolutions, these plans, and intentions we draw up for ourselves on a yearly, monthly, weekly, hourly, minute-by-minute basis plug into something deep and essential within us.
In Holub’s poem, the off beam map “works” because it is a Something-To-Do, a Hope Project. We need these when faced with the icy-waste(ful) anxiety of a Nothing-To-Do, our Hopeless Projects. Being lost, awaiting our end.
Of course you don’t need to be lost and close to death in the Alps circa 1943 to have had that feeling, or to feel “reassured” when whatever resolution it is gets made and off you go in what you hope, at least for now, to be the “right” direction.
Are you doing that? Are you looking for maps on which your deepest human needs and values are imprinted? Maybe you’re not entirely sure what those needs are. If so, here are some worksheets I sometimes use with my clients (and myself). You can treat these like psychological maps, if you like.
Goodbye.