The art of the New Year's resolution
A balance of feasibility and desire
Last year, I was sensible about it. I wrote a list of six relatively realistic goals and when the year was up, I was able to tick four of them off, with a fifth basically done bar the formalities. They were all most sensible; to work on my finances and relationship, to improve my languages, to stay in my job. They were kind of resolutions that just trying to live my best life – and to a certain extent keeping the midlife show on the road necessitates my living my best life anyway – would all see me working towards; they involved a realistic assessment of the time I actually had and the condition I would be in to spend it. Nothing, in short, like the old days, when I’d add onto a to-do list between ‘buy milk’ and ‘send invoice’ a lofty goal like ‘Find publisher’ or ‘Learn Russian’, daring myself not to forget the bigger dreams while also half believing I’d be capable of pulling them off anyway.
All very sensible, to the extent that this year’s resolutions were largely a repeat, tho with ‘Finalise divorce’ swapped out for something which will hopefully prove more uplifting. Still, the overwhelming vibe is sobriety, realism, and small-bore improvements compounding in benefits over time. I’ve been around long enough by now – my 44th new year just rolled around – to know that you can’t really control what comes down the pipe, that all the will in the world can’t manifest the outcomes you want, and that all that’s really controllable is your attitudes to what comes to pass. (Note the plural; most of us feel many different ways about the things which happen to us).
There have been times when I’ve made a virtue of that stability, saying that this year I’d only read books which I already owned or even more stolidly saying that my ambition for the year was simply to continue. And there are indeed some years where that attitude of holding what you’ve got appears just the right one to take.
Yet something in all this level-headedness leaves a hollow taste. Why wasn’t I leaping for joy when I ticked off a whole four of my targets for 2025? That’s an astoundingly high resolution success rate. Something just feels lacking. It is good to pay off your credit cards; it doesn’t feel like something you’ll be thinking about on your death bed. You can save money; you can work on your friendships; you can find time to read and run. But you no longer feel that you can write ‘This year, I’ll sell my book!’ or ‘This year, I’ll have a hit play!’ and with a straight face.
Of course, you can resolve to finally write your book, that’s different, or you can resolve to put effort into achieving the things you want – but you know by now that all the best will in the world doesn’t make things happen, that you need luck, and you can’t write down ‘Have more luck’ as a resolution.
It’d be different if I were still at the stage – tho I have never really been at the stage – where my issue was getting work done at all or optimizing the times I needed to do it. In fact I’ve started every year of my adult life with a fierce work ethic and determination to get things done. I’m long since at the upper limit of my plausible input; nor, aside from a slightly unfortunate addiction to Coke Zero, do I have many more bad habits to wean myself off.
And when it comes to my still unrealised ambitions, I know that I could work on all the ideas for books and plays and films I like but that that would have no material impact on their chances of getting produced. That’s a lesson of all the years which have rolled round before, of it no longer being my first rodeo, which was what led to me making my goals more realistic in the first place. I can write down on my list ‘Learn Russian’ but I also know by now that’s a five-year process and that doing so would cost me a lot of other things. Ditto novels.
My Dad has been gravely ill this year. On multiple occasions this autumn, I found myself thinking, if we can just make it to Christmas with everyone vaguely in one piece, I’ll be a happy man. And we did, and I was indeed very grateful, grateful to the point where I said out loud to my parents at Christmas dinner how much I appreciated us all being there. It seemed to me that we had quickly gone back to taking each other’s very presence, right down to our faults, for granted. But perhaps that was in itself a sign of normality. I think part of the virtue of the customary and comfortable is that you do take it for granted, that you are allowed to take it for granted, that it is tried and safe enough to support the delusion it can be kicked against cost-free.
Nonetheless, such gratitude never quite obviates the desire for novelty and surprise. I try to remind myself of the good things in my life; my health, my friends, my job. And of course you, my readers. For a long time you weren't there. But part of the nature of humans and the so-called hedonic treadmill is there is always this residual desire for the new next thing. The editor who really connects with my work. The theatre who finally wants to put on my play. Even, dare I say it, the unexpected flirtation… The element, above all, of surprise. Surprise me, life!
I recognise that many would find it indulgent to wish for something new on top of all the good that I have. Would caution me that to wish for surprises can entail unwelcome ones as well. Yet tho I cannot write it down as a resolution – what would it even look like? – I found myself, faced by another humble and gradualist list, wishing also for something unexpected and new to occur in my life. I wish for life to blindside me, to not leave me not feeling I know it all, to transform my experience and challenge my priors. Be careful what you wish for, I hear you say, and I acknowledge the luxury of my longing; I could tho just as well respond that not wishing for anything big at all, that maintaining a respectful difference from your dreams, can have a considerable negative impact too. With the best will in the world, ‘more of the same’ quite quickly becomes a hard thing to get up for in the morning.