Someone asked me what my New Year’s Resolution was…
I answered, “I don’t make resolutions in the traditional sense. I couldn’t give a shit about my weight or my health, and I’m happy with my current financial status, and if I’m not happy with any of those, some silly platitude made in the moment of a ball dropping isn’t going to change any of that.”
So, I simply resolve to read more books, love more people, and in general do more things that make me FEEL. Even if it’s something negative, I just want to feel more. I don’t want to live my life, I want to feel my life. I wan to feel as if when I wake up, I’m more receptive to the experiences, both positive and negative that make up the totality of the human experience.
I simply want to make a conscious effort to be more human this year.
This year, I simply want to be lost in an emotional torrent instead of the last 35 years of Spock-like logic and reason. Granted, it’s gotten me where I wanted to be, but it feels barren. It feels like I’m eating chocolate cake, but through an IV.
…I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms…- Thoreau
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Though, despite the context, I need not go into the woods to live deliberately.
I want to be angry at the world, and then make love to it in the next minute, like lovers in a quarrel over an imagined slight. I want to be happy at the madness and elated at the sight of life. I want to see a child and feel overwhelming sadness at the slew of problems awaiting him or her, but grateful that they get to exist at all. I want to be grateful for the experience of life before I don’t live anymore.
I don’t want to “resolve” anything this year.
I want to evolve.
I don’t want to set things right. The things that have been, have laid the foundation for the things that are, and if the things that are have conspired together in some godlike plan, then I would be foolish to interfere with it. If they have coalesced due to natural forces, then I would be silly to go against the flow of the universe. I don’t want to correct anything in the past. If anything, I want to focus the coalescence until I cannot possibly evolve any further.
My weight is of no consequence. My money situation fluctuates depending on how lazy I am. I don’t need a “house” when I am always “at home.” I don’t care about being good, I don’t care about being bad, I don’t care about being an individual, or part of the collective…politically correct or incorrect. I don’t care about any of that. I only want to evolve.
I only need the following. My wife, my daughter, my friends, a notebook, a pencil and an idea. Provided I have those things, everything else follows.
It bothers me when people say, “I resolve to…” That’s such bullshit. You don’t make decisions that way. A decision comes when you absolutely leave no other option. A decision comes in that pivotal moment when you take action that directs you toward a particular goal. Your resolution is quite simply a misplaced preference, doomed to failure before it even got a chance to leave the launchpad. A decision comes when you have absolutely had it and refuse to accept anything else. It doesn’t come in a melodramatic moment watching that asshole Carson Daily on TV in New York. It comes from the anger and frustration of not being able to accept any less that you are absolutely capable of. It comes when you feel. It comes when you care.
So, I say FUCK RESOLUTIONS.
Be who you are. Focus on being more true to who you are. As Winston Smith would say, “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
However you define yourself, define yourself even further. If you’re a lover, love more. If you’re a fighter, fight more. If you piss people off, piss off even more people. Don’t resolve that two and two make five or three.
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