New Years Unresolutions

I have something of a love-hate relationship with New Years. 

I love the idea of new beginnings, fresh starts, yada yada... but hate the fact that every year, all of those earnest commitments are broken and discarded within days.  With, of course, the resulting feelings of failure that accompany them. 

I've decided that New Years Resolutions are not for me.  They're just not.  They don't work for me.  I'm already depressed, so the inevitable feelings of failure in making  resolutions that I know I'll break (and embarrassingly soon) aren't something that I need in my life right now.  I just don't.  Too much stress going into an already bleak time of year.  Bad combination.

Instead, I think I'm going to adopt a tortoise-and-hare approach.  I think I can handle that a bit less ineptly than the whole "multiple major life changes at once" thing.

I think, in 2020, I'm going to adopt a "New Day's Resolution" and do it  365 times.

Every day, improve just a little bit... in one area.  Just a bit.  Be a bit better than I was the day before.  Improve just a smidgen.  Just a tad.  Slow and steady.  Explore new habits... but one at a time.  Integrate new practices... one at a time.  Slowly.  Deliberately.  Carefully.

Then, I'm going to go easy on myself if I'm not perfect even at that.  After all, it's just one day, right?  There are 364 other ones that I can turn into successes.

And when you think about it, that's less disappointing, isn't it?  Let's see... make all kinds of grand and glorious changes for the year, and fail at all of them within 10 days... or stumble on the 1 thing... the little bit... you're changing THAT DAY, knowing you can go have a bowl of ice cream to console yourself and  try again in the morning.

Yeah.  Definitely less stressful.

So this New Year, instead of scribbling down a poorly-thought-out list of major life changes I want to fail at in the next couple of weeks, I'm going to make un-resolutions.  And I'm going to take it slow. and steady.  And hopefully, at the end of this coming year, I can look back at a plethora of small, but significant, changes that I've made each day, that have come together to make my life just a little bit better overall than it was this year.