My New Year’s Resolve

Physical Exercise aka P.E (Photo credit: Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums)

Note it does not say “Resolutions.” Just “Resolve.” There’s a difference.

Resolutions are those spout-’em-over-and-over statements we make each year, just to placate our souls or line up in dumb agreement with our friends. Things like losing weight, quitting smoking, running more, stressing less, taking time to relax, fitting in more leisure activities. When you look at the list of promises we make to ourselves, there’s so much contradictory crap, it’s no wonder the list morphs into a pile of pixie dust by the end of January.

Instead of statements promising to do a certain thing, why not try some resolve in 2013? Webster’s Dictionary defines this word as “to reduce to constituent elements or simple parts; to separate or change by or through a process; to clear of difficulties; to remove doubts, to explain, to solve…” Why not apply the philosophy of resolve to our lives for a change? Instead of trying to apply one single, unswerving answer to a dilemma, why not look at the issue as something made up of individual elements that may not all have one nice, tight solution, but instead, several solutions; all of them good, all of them usable and when applied in concert, providing a better result than just trying to fit one pat response around the problem? And make it easy, rather than complicate, when it comes to working out the best response.

It’s pretty rare that life hands us nice, neat conundrums that can be fixed with nice, neat answers. There should be room for multiple solutions to a single issue, and those multiple solutions should all be useful at once. The classic example would be weight loss. The simple solution would be to eat less and exercise more. But there are many other offshoot solutions for this issue: the type of exercise chosen, frequency of exercise and meals, foods eaten (or not), mind tricks, workout partners, etc.

We all know people who make lists of resolutions, but never get them done, because there’s no resolve in place. Without the willingness to reduce what needs to be done to the simplest elements, it all remains very complicated – and leads right back to another New Year’s Day, and yet another grimly-created, half-joking annual “what-I’m-gonna-do” list.

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• Buck The Trend: Resolve Not To Resolve! (holymansam.wordpress.com)