These Difficult Times

Every new year’s eve — besides getting a little too drunk amongst confetti-strewn strangers — what is it that we always do? We always come up with New Year’s resolutions.

For those of you who may not know what a New Year’s resolution is, it’s a small proclamation we make about our goals for the upcoming year. Some examples are:

• I gotta lose ten pounds.
• I’d like to spend more time with my family.
• I want to learn a new language.
• I’m not going to let myself be a victim this year.
• I want to save more and spend less.
• I gotta finally quit smoking.

My question for you then is this: Is there a pattern beneath the surface of these resolutions, some other meaning? Notice how many of these resolutions commonly involve our bodies, our relationships, and our finances.

Let me first state that the phenomena of New Year’s resolutions bolsters the vibrant culture of self-help here in the United States (an arguably molly-coddling and thereby flawed culture: check this book out for more). The murky history behind New Year’s resolutions appears to go back a long way and continues in many other cultures today.

But of greater importance is the actual meaning buried within the resolutions themselves: the proclaimer of a New Year’s resolution reveals a lot about herself because the resolution forms a negative image of the difficulty she faces. It may be a solution to the difficulty, a path to overcoming the difficulty, but it usually no more than a vague roadmap to satisfaction.

The meaning hidden within New Year’s resolutions is this: we identify the difficulties that negatively impact our lives and that to overcome them we must exert our mental energy.

The resolutions listed above, if we translate them or spin their meaning in a different way, what else can we see?

• I gotta lose ten pounds. I desire more control over my body and diet.
• I’d like to spend more time with my family. I have been selfish lately and I feel guilty about it.
• I want to learn a new language. I feel guilty about not challenging myself mentally and would like to go on a trip to a foreign country.
• I’m not going to let myself be a victim this year. I feel ashamed of my weak character and I desire greater strength.
• I want to spend less and save more. I’m nervous about the future because I have a lot of debt, and I desire more control over my buying habits.
• I gotta finally quit smoking. My addiction to smoking is costing me big money and destroying my body. I desire control over this addiction.

We see that most resolutions are motivated by negative aspects our our lives, aspects that we believe we can acquire some control over. So what does this mean? It means that we use New Year’s Eve as an inaugural event of a new period of greater effort, of greater control, that we understand our position in a world ruled by time, and that we don't have that much of it.

These resolutions reveal what appears to me as backward thinking. What we should do first is acknowledge and carefully examine our difficulty, not create a (re)solution for it. When we study our difficulties as real forces, as real agents of very real pain, ones that are sometimes hidden from our conscious mind, this examination often precipitates a solution automatically.

What I therefore recommend, instead of blindly creating New Year’s resolutions, is temporarily adopting a difficulty-oriented style of thinking, one that savors difficulties for what they are: walls, adversaries, and hurdles in our lives that give us meaning. This forces you to focus on the details of whatever difficulty you face; this then causes those difficulties to dissolve.