Three years ago, you would have caught me looking into my journal, listing all the things I have to do and the commitments I have to keep as the New Year rolls in. The plan was always to maintain an unbeaten streak like Catholics do during the Lenten fast, where forgetting and eating meat sometimes felt like you had committed the worst crime—I once heard that doing so meant we were eating the flesh of Jesus and the blood was now all over our hands and mouth.
I grew older, like everyone else, and then each new year came around with less enthusiasm and the realisation that most of us were still the same people from the night before; no fairy had landed magically and made sure the problems of the last year remained in the past. We still had to deal with old problems and the consequences of old actions in the new year and gradually, I began to leave the idealistic chants of “New year, New me” behind. This year, after taking a hiatus from making resolutions. I’ve decided to make two:
To be the most authentic version of myself
To enjoy life just as Lady Donli, my president, has mandated.
Actually, I made these resolutions at some unidentified point in time last year and have already been working towards achieving these to the best of my capability. The trick most times is not to expect magic to happen overnight, especially if it’s the first time I’m considering a decision, and I also don’t expect it to be easy just because I said so. What summed this up for me was captured in a conversation I overheard last year in the response to a colleague’s eagerness to get the job done while possibly avoiding the back and forth over discussions and emails: Well, that’s how life is sometimes.
True to that phrase, life is sometimes an imperfect mess with occasional perfect moments, and it can get infuriating and feel like there is no way through difficulties sometimes. Even the simplest things can go in completely different directions than you envisioned, which happens more times than we often care to admit, and with this often comes fears associated with not achieving a thing.
While giving his TED Talk titled: Why You Should Define Your Fears Instead of Your Goals, Tim Ferris gives a number of reasons for fear setting. It’s like goal setting, but for everything that you are afraid of. By asking questions like: What’s the worst that could happen if this doesn’t work out? What could I do to prevent this from happening, and if this happened, What can I do to repair the damage? Once you answer these, you’re better able to see what is between you and the success of a goal or a resolution and be able to make better decisions that are beneficial to your personal health and work, whatever the situation.
The fun part about making resolutions with this understanding is that whether you are crying or laughing, in that moment, that is what is most authentic to you. This is the kind of resolve that gets you through the smaller resolves, like deciding to go back to school for studies or deciding to change addresses before the September rains. Actually, there is a third resolution:
To practice gratitude.
Being thankful requires the presence of mind to actually acknowledge the good that has happened in moments that go by too quickly. If you grew up in a religious home, like I did, you will remember the simple admonishments if you jumped right into asking for what you need. Thank God for all he has done first before you start asking, many guardians and parents would say. That simple phrase creates the habit of gratitude which is especially important as most of the world begins to question old traditions, rules and religions and families and communities begin to find themselves depleted by individuals setting out to form little clusters of their own without any obligation to follow the rules and cultures created over time by these groups and societies.
I’m always thankful for new beginnings and the possibilities and lessons that they hold, more so because beginnings and endings are almost always tied up in each other: for something to begin, something else must have ended. Then, all that is left is the journey between.
