Happy 2023! This is a celebratory post for another chain of 365 days which hopefully will be a decent one. I’m past the point of trying to be edgy and making fun of “new year’s resolutions” as a thing. Though I’ve decided that resolutions rarely last a long time into the year, this past summer I actually found a system to keep myself more or less consistent in pursuing several projects and ambitions at once. After “piloting” this system myself (as a self-help junkie for all of my adolescence leading up to now, still), I can honestly say this method fits the bill for me in every way. It’s not foolproof, especially not for accomplishing every single one of the aspirations that I set. But in general it makes me find the process of creating resolutions and pursuing them fun again. And why shouldn’t it be exciting and fun to work on things that are by definition good for you?
I like resolutions and think they don’t deserve the mockery and ridicule for the mere assumption that people who set them are delusional and desperate to defy realistic patterns of life (such as the fact that perhaps these people are being pushed and pulled by so many other social forces that they don’t get to work on themselves, or simply the difficulty of sticking to one thing for long when the world moves on so fast). Resolutions definitely have a built-in feature of wishful thinking. But then I realize it’s this wishful thinking in small and practical dosage makes life more bearable, if not truly amazing. Not a lot of other things would grant a person both a sense of agency in their own life and self-betterment (which more often than not translates to the betterment of their surrounding too). Thus I always embrace new year’s resolutions for what I can gain from them (even if in the mix there’s a disappointed realization around March of my failure to uphold these very resolutions). Though they have not always been fulfilled satisfyingly in the past, I kept at fine-tuning my own approach to new year’s resolutions just so they could work for me better. And get more fun, too.
I’m having high hopes for 2023 because I’m ready to stride towards some hard-to-chew ambitions (for my standard only; they might not be so ambitious nor challenging for many). Whatever resolutions I have generated for 2023 and the foundation that will aid me in staying on track instill in me a sense of confidence and hope that may dwindle with time but for now just feels so freaking awesome!! Of course the year being a good one isn’t dependent on a list of aspirations or a setup that supposedly makes this list more prone to actualization. They do, however, add a bit of a boost for taking my own state of being in the year ahead into my hands as much as I can, and for knowing that 2023 doesn’t have to be full of cynicism, inhibition, or self-resignation. Happy new year everyone!