New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
— Mark Twain
I’d become so disillusioned with New Year’s resolutions that, in 2001, I wrote a polemic about their futility. After reading it, a friend asked me, "But don’t you believe in setting goals?" Actually, I do. It’s just that I no longer associate my goals with the arbitrary date of January 1. Vic Johnson, motivational speaker and author of the Goals 2 Go blog, seems to agree with me. (Update: And so, apparently, does Betty Baye in her commentary on NPR’s News & Notes with Ed Gordon.)
In the "Blondie" comic strip several years ago, the fun-loving main character Dagwood Bumstead announced that his goals for the new year included logging more hours on the sofa, eating more double-decker sandwiches and taking more baths and naps, because they were all resolutions he could stick to. Inspired by Dagwood, I came up with my own list of failsafe resolutions:
- flip through more magazines and catalogs
- pet the cat more often
- see what’s in the TiVo
- eat more chocolate (the good stuff)
- listen to more Pandora
- do more web surfing
Whoo-hoo! Happy New Year.
Posted January 1, 2006 by Mariva in holidays, resources
