Resolute

It’s easy to make promises to yourself.

For many privileged college students, January means vowing to eat better, to work out more, to stop wasting so much time on Facebook and to finally stop drinking so much.

These are all worthy goals for improving your health. Actually achieving any of the above would likely make for an easier semester, as well as helping you to gain some healthy habits.

It’s also easy to break promises to yourself.

I used to make concrete resolutions based on dieting, exercising and studying. Substantive goals like these are easy to monitor.

I could hold onto them as proof of my self-improvement.

However, they would inevitably fall apart as the year dragged on, because my heart wasn’t in them.

They were arbitrary goals to satisfy my need to treat the new year like a clean slate, which it isn’t.

New Year’s Day does not undo your past. You still carry the same baggage.You still know the same people. You still feel the same feelings. Any change, any resolutions you make to yourself, will have to come gradually.

That’s the reason I always fail to keep up with dieting or restricting my Internet use. I expect to achieve a new sort of self-control overnight. This is a recipe for disaster.

Now, I’m more concerned with trying to effect substantial change within myself. It’s harder to measure and requires plenty of self-criticism. Usually it isn’t easy to express in words. The trick is to promise yourself something you won’t give up on when you break it.

For me, this means being more careful with my language and actions, rethinking how I approach myself and better appreciating what I have.

I know it sounds vague, but it’s inspired by a friend of mine who texted me, “Be grateful or be graveful.”

It’s my new “hakuna matata.” It means no worries, as long as you understand all the good that surrounds you. Otherwise you risk forgetting what keeps you afloat, which will make you feel grave.

It’s not the same thing as losing weight, and I’m sure I’ll mess up, but it’s good motivation.

Even though I’m proud I can count the number of sodas I drank last year on one hand, I don’t think I learned anything about myself from it.

This year, my resolution is both more ambiguous and more ambitious, which can only mean I have a lot of mistakes to make.

I think it also means I can only make more of a difference to myself.

-ptbeane@indiana.edu