New Year’s Resolutions

If I had to choose between voting either yea or nay, I’d vote in favor of New Year’s resolutions. It’s not that I hold any particular fondness for them, or that I’ve made any particularly challenging or important ones over the years, but more that I support the general sentiment behind them: reflecting on one’s life and making a decision about how that life could be better in the year to come. My only beef with them, really, is the time frame. Making resolutions for a whole year, and only doing so once a year, seems to be dooming yourself to failure. I’m lucky if I even remember what my previous resolutions were, let alone actually keeping them in mind the whole year in between.

What I’m really trying to get at is this: the reminder to reflect on our lives and change them for the better is important, but even better is a way of life that involves continuous reflection and change. Now, as good as our intentions are, it’s easy to get into a rut, and a little reminder to do some reflecting is definitely called for. Yes, sometimes things might jump out at us as needing to change, and we can deal with those as they come, but other things will only be apparent if we take a minute to pause and consider how we can make our lives better: do our actions correspond with our values? Are we living in ways that simply gratify us, or are we actually living lives that will make us happier? What do we want out of life, anyway? These are the kinds of questions that I want to reflect on regularly, and that I think we could all benefit from thinking about. Frequently I do think about these things, but sometimes they get pushed out of mind. Sometimes I feel too busy, or too stressed, and I forget to reflect.

My solution? A new resolution: more personal reflection. When I get to the end of a month, I want to ask myself, “Did I get everything I could have out of that month? What changes can I make to how I live the next month that will make me happier with it at its end?” When I get to the end of a week, I want to ask myself, “Was that a week that I was satisfied with, or did I just let another week go by without appreciating it?” When I get to the end of a day, I want to ask myself, “Was there anything I didn’t do today that I wish I’d done? Is there anything I can try to do differently tomorrow?” Maybe this will be too much. Maybe when I get to the end of the first couple of weeks, my answer will be, “Yes, I need to change, I need to reflect less because I’m stressing myself out trying to change too much.” But for now, I’m going with my philosophical training, which tells me that self-reflection is the best policy.