Jan 1, 2020
I was naive enough to ask my husband if he thought the gym at our club would be open today. “Bee, its their busiest day of the year, of course it’s open.” True, I thought . The resolutions list are likely to have ‘work out” at the very top. Why? because the notion that if we exercise we will be more healthy, we will have better bodies. We will better ourselves. Which is the entire purpose of resolutions, to become better people, right? Which begs the question : what kind of people were we this past year that we are so eager to shed them and start over? why do these resolutions brings us so much comfort? The word that comes to mind is hope. I think we look back and see where we tripped on our own feet and think “yikes”. I think we look back and see where someone stuck their leg out to purposefully trip us and we think “never again.” Our lives will be better from now on because we have resolved that it will be so and we have list to prove it.
Work out.
Change jobs.
No booze.
No Instagram.
Read more.
Learn a new language.
Travel.
Eat better.
Stay away from toxic people.
Block the fuckboy.
Find my passion.
Get a raise.
Move out of my parent’s house.
All designed to make you a new and better you. The problem is time passing and the hands on a clock moving won’t be what will make us new. The people we were 24 hours ago are the people we are now still and there is a reason those people (us) gravitate towards the behavior that led us to create a self improvement list in the first place. So I resolve to give up on lists. It’s not that I don’t want to be better, it’s not that there is no room for improvement here. There is plenty, trust me. But I cannot overhaul myself to start at zero partly because it is a sisyphean task of epic proportions and partly because a complete overhaul, a deleting and erasing to start again at zero means that no part of my 2019 self was worthy saving. And that is simply not true.
A criminology study determined that over fifty percent of the crime happens within less than five percent of the blocks in a city. There is not an entire bad neighborhood or bad area as we tend to think. Just like cities, we are not all bad or all good. We have specific areas were we repeatedly mess up - a couple of really bad blocks in which we commit our crimes, albeit unjailable offenses but offenses nonetheless- against ourselves and against others. The triggers that lead us to react badly over and over and relive negative stories we tell ourselves, they live here.
So in 2020 the list has been replaced with a more specific principle- to not lead a life of crime. My friend Jon and I share a theory that lists are in general not effective towards behavioral change, but that starting out slow, picking one word to focus on, one that embodies what we want to live by in the coming year -a word that describes what we will strive for and adhere to. Maybe your word is peace, or self love, maybe your word is declutter, maybe your word is contribute. Whatever your word is it will be powerful if you stick to it. It has been proven -not by a new age clown in LA, but by science -that we all feed off each others energy. Whatever good things you do to and for yourself you will inadvertently pass on to others, contributing far more than you could think and for far longer than three hundred and sixty five days. So latch on to whatever momentum the energy of the New Year gives you to take steps towards who you want to be and the kind of world you want to live in- hopefully one where we will all be criminals no more.
*in case you're wondering my word is contribute, I'm tracking my progress and I feel like this counts. Happy 2020 :)
