To Resolve or Not To Resolve

It’s almost the start of a New Year and time to decide whether to resolve or not to resolve...Resolutions are tricky things for most people.  Since it is proven that a habit takes at least 21 days to be formed, it appears that human beings have a difficult time committing themselves to doing the same thing over and over for 21 days...thus resolutions get broken.

But...is it really difficult for us to form a habit or is there something more at work in this process?  We are certainly able to form the habits of daily hygiene, most of us have some sort of eating rituals we do daily, many of us have a routine for getting ready for bed or getting ready for the next day...

Could it be that resolutions fail because we choose goals that are either not realistic or which...we cannot truly commit to because we are picking them for wrong reasons--like...someone else would like us to do the thing, we think we "should" do the thing, we think we want the thing but we have conflicting emotions or beliefs about having or doing the thing?  Yes, there is definitely more to resolutions than meets the eye.

Also, let us look at the idea of commitment.  When you make a New Year's resolution you are, in essence, setting yourself to commit for the entire year.  Now for many people, that is no big deal.  But if we look at our current culture's short attention spans and focus on...squirrel...well, you know, committing to a year of doing the same thing just about seems like total tedium and we quit after a short while, usually before we even get to 21 days but sometimes after that because...we get bored.

If a resolution is going to be put in place, perhaps it should be one that is fluid and flexible.  Like, "I resolve to check in with myself every day to see if there is something healthy I want or need to do." Or "I resolve to revisit my goals every week to see if they are still things I am passionate about and I give myself permission to alter them if I choose."

I do know that writing goals down does in fact help to achieve them because it keeps them in your focus--so long as you revisit them regularly.  But I also know that making goals that are unreachable or inflexible is a resolution killer.

A current trend is to choose a word that you want to build your life around for the year like "joy" or "health" or "love."  And this can work too.  It really doesn't matter whether you do or do not make a resolution because lets face it, each day you are alive is going to be different from the last. You aren't going to be in the same place tomorrow that you are today--at least not in many respects.  As John Travolta's character George O'Malley in the movie "Phenomenon" said, "Everything is on its way to somewhere."

(c) 2020 SZing, Spiritual Creator. All Rights Reserved. Photographs courtesy of Pixabay public domain images.