Only One Resolution For Me This New Years Eve

Like most men, I make, and abjectly fail to keep, New Year’s Resolutions.  Every year, without respite.  Of course, I’m good at thinking them up.

In fact, if I had an over-arching aim (as modern business-speak would have it) of simply making New Year’s Resolutions, I would count my endeavours in this field as a real success.  Brief, targeted, eminently achievable lists are honed down to their most realistic, most practicable, most unmissable set of aims.  I can make the most reasonable set of resolutions imaginable.

But keeping to those resolutions – that is a different matter altogether.  I am typically crap.  I flounder even before the bells of Big Ben have ceased to reverberate around the living room; I fail miserably while the champagne still fizzes, yet to be swilled, in its flutes, and while the party poppers, popped on the very stroke of twelve, still drift earthwards on their brief flights of celebration.

And yet, like so many of my gender, I come up with another list, year after year.  Drink just a little bit less; exercise just a touch more; watch TV just a few minutes less; read a couple of pages more.  Think about starting to write a book; try to write some letters, even just consider writing some Christmas cards next December.  All these attempts at leading a better life – they all go out the window.

So, this year, I’m going to make just one resolution – one I reckon I’ve got a fighting, if very small, chance of keeping.  This time, I’m keeping it simple, straightforward, and above all easy.  It will be a resolution not to improve myself in any way.  At all.

I won’t try to go swimming three times a week, and I won’t try to learn and use a new word every day, and I certainly won’t drink any less – not a drop.  I won’t be speaking a new language this time next year, I won’t have de-rusted the car, I won’t have a Blue Ribbon for tap dancing, I won’t be any nicer to my stoically tolerant parents, and I won’t have clocked up a single metre of virtual water on the rowing machine I won’t have bought.

Of course, this isn’t necessarily as good a resolution to my problem of Resolutions as it might initially appear.  In deliberately not trying to improve my life, I might end up making it significantly worse.  In not trying to achieve, I could significantly under-achieve.  I might still miss such a low target.  I could take up heroin, or wife-beating or even amateur dramatics.  Yes, the risks are still significant – maybe they’re even higher, given what I’ve got to lose.  Have you ever seen an all-amateur production of The Gondoliers?  (Come to think of it, have you ever seen a professional production of The Gondoliers?)

So wish me luck.  There’s a whole host of downgrades I could make to my life.  The year stretches out in front of me like a minefield.  Best foot forward.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com