New year’s resolutions and other contradictions
Amid the holiday glamour and glitter, some find moments for pondering life and taking stock of themselves and their lives. That sometimes leads to dark nights of the soul, where attempts are made to reconcile personal goals, beliefs and feelings with experience and reality.
But moods are mostly light hearted leading up to the New Year and its custom of self-improvement resolutions like losing weight, becoming better organized, and enjoying life more. Every year the tips offered for success include setting firm goals and time frames for achieving them, visualizing success, and starting with baby steps.
Santa may bring children at least some of things on their lists, but New Year’s resolutions don’t magically come to pass. Nearly half of adults make resolutions. Around 8% actually achieve them.
As the holidays fade into bleak midwinter, everyday life intervenes to sabotage the discipline and effort needed to achieve goals. Fear of failure seeps in to frustrate the process and prompt a search for excuses for avoiding direct responsibility for the downfall of good intentions.
Regardless of how airtight the alibis may seem, failure brings with it the darkness of a spiritual crisis of self image. We’re faced with the reality that we aren’t what we would like the world to think we are. We’ve been hiding behind elaborately constructed masks to convince everyone that we’re the (almost) perfect mother/father/butcher/baker/candlestick maker.
In other words, personal failure brings us face to face with an emperor who has no clothes.
But of course even near perfection at anything simply isn’t possible. We’re prone to misjudgment and error and capable of holding conflicting, even outright contradictory, sets of beliefs. For instance, we can call ourselves pro life, loudly oppose abortion, and passively sit by without a whimper as untold numbers of defenseless infants and children suffer and die from malnutrition, live in unsafe environments and have woefully inadequate educational opportunities.
Beyond our built-in imperfections, life itself is messy and occasionally chaotic. Events happen randomly and capriciously, with and without warning. In order to survive, we have no alternative but to adapt as best we can.
Our wonderful complexity, imperfection and adaptability are what make us human. But we’re not necessarily locked into lives of despair.
Failures, including in New Year’s resolutions, and other dark nights of the soul bring with them a unique risk and present significant opportunities. The risk is being tempted to blame others for adversity, and burrow deeper into a cave of self-pity over circumstances that may not be totally beyond our control.
After the acute suffering from failure subsides, there’s a possibility of emerging from the mask of wannabe perfection and becoming better acquainted with ourselves as lovable, wonderfully imperfect individuals living among others just like us.
Failure also provides opportunities for acquiring wisdom by adjusting beliefs to conform to reality. Learning from experience sometimes requires examining possibly-oppressive notions of “common sense.” Occasionally, common sense translates into everyone making the same mistake. For instance, the one-time common-sense idea that girls were constitutionally too weak to play full-court basketball is ludicrous today.
In the end, the goals of losing weight or becoming better organized are more complex than simply wanting and deciding to do so. Furthermore, accomplishing them may present new and different sets of personal issues and problems.
My holiday season’s wish for everyone is to look in the mirror, softly smile at the lovable, wonderfully imperfect person you see and find contentment.
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