I’ve never been one for New Year’s Resolutions.
To be honest, I’m kind of a buzzkill about New Year’s in general; I mean, the earth made a full rotation around the sun, yay. That’s cool and all, but it’s really just another day. I remember New Year’s Eve in 1999: if you’re old enough to recall it, you’ll never forget the fanatical Y2K scare leading up to the year 2000. My parents made me leave a party at 10pm so I would be home at midnight, not because they were doomsayers, but because they didn’t want me on the road with people who were. When the clock struck twelve, we went into the kitchen and turned on our Dell PC tower. When it finally powered up (fully two minutes later, the barbarism!), the date said “01-01-00,” and that was that. The world kept spinning. The grid kept operating. It was just another day.
Still, I get the appeal.
There is something powerful about the idea of a new year as a fresh start, an opportunity for a clean slate to begin anew. We all need chances to turn a new leaf, and the best thing about being a New Year’s Resolution-hater is the corresponding belief that those chances come every single day! You can make a New Week Resolution, or a New Thursday Resolution, or a New Moment Resolution and start right now becoming the person you want to be.
As a matter of fact, this week is one of those turning points in my life.
Seventeen years after my daughter was born and I dropped out of grad school, this week is the start of classes for my doctorate degree. I am in a completely different field of study this time around, one I would not have chosen when I was 22 anyway. Honestly, this is not a path I ever would have imagined for myself until one day last year when I looked around and realized it’s the path I was already on; this is just the next step I hadn’t seen until now. After all these years, I had convinced myself not only that I didn’t need another degree, but that I didn’t really deserve it anyway. Really, the first day of the rest of my life was September 17, 2024: the day I started emailing department chairs at universities to determine where I would ultimately study. It was the day I started fresh believing again in my capacity to grow and help others.
Maybe you don’t really know what you want to work on, or perhaps parenting, marriage, health, or just life is monopolizing all your mental and emotional energy, so you aren’t really ready to make a change right now. That’s okay; you don’t have to feel pressured to make some big commitment just because your home planet is continuing its orbit or because you read some parenting blog about changing your life. You are not required to wipe your slate clean on the first day of the year, nor are you required to wait for January 1 or any other arbitrary date on a man-made calendar before you can be who you want to be and do what you want to do. If you want to go back to school, start taking your health more seriously, meditate more and yell less, go to therapy, be more present with your kids, or whatever your goals may be, you can do that on January 1 or January 20 or September 17 or whatever day you wake up and decide to go for it.
