In our long life, we’ve learned a great deal about New Years resolutions from abandoning so many that we finally got with the fact that they generally didn’t work. We relate mightily to this wise, funny little video we found in Instagram:
Really, the way to manage goals is to choose truly do-able ones, or none at all, or be willing to kindly amend them as needed.
We prefer THIS from a column titled “I Hate New Year’s Day” that intellectual Antonio Gramsci published in the Italian Socialist Party’s official paper Avanti! in 1916 (full text here.)
Every morning, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s day...
That’s why I hate these New Year’s that fall like fixed maturities, which turn life and human spirit into a commercial concern with its neat final balance, its outstanding amounts, its budget for the new management. They make us lose the continuity of life and spirit.
I want every morning to be a new year’s for me. Every day I want to reckon with myself, and every day I want to renew myself. No day set aside.
We also LOVE this practice employed by a woman whose view has been shaped by illness:
So instead of New Year’s resolutions, I drew up a list for [the past year] of experiences that had already passed: a record not of self-mastery but of genuine surprise.
It echoes the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel who “prayed for wonders instead of happiness” and said, God “gave them to me.)
Wonder and genuine surprise is what we’re going for this year…
Shooting Star recorded by Tom Ashcraft of Heliotown.
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