New year's resolutions never made a lot of sense to me. There's no magic in a year moving from one number to the next; it's just one day ending and another one beginning, the same as every other time. Hanging big life changes on an arbitrary point in time always seemed to me to detract from, rather than enhance, whatever sense of agency or self-direction they're meant to be the product of. The thought I keep coming back to, which I can't adequately source but would still be confident comes from Back to Work is pretty simple: if you were really serious about changing, you'd have changed already.
Despite that, I still quite like them. I figure that anyone who makes the effort to reflect on what they're not happy with in their life and make a plan to fix it deserves as much encouragement as they can get, and if doing it at the same time as a huge number of other people helps, then that's great. I think that's probably best part of it – we all seem to have settled on this collective permission for a new year ticking over to mean that we can course-correct, or that it's slightly less uncomfortable to admit to the things that haven't been working the way we'd want. There's something comfortingly aspirational about the idea – everyone has their own stuff to deal with, but we all kind of tacitly acknowledge that there are usually things we can do that'll help, and that there's always the prospect of things getting better.
Although I'm not usually very resolution-y, I still make goals. I keep more plans and lists than I could probably count if I didn't have a list of them as well, as anyone familiar with my particular kind of obsessiveness would expect. In an unguarded moment yesterday, I re-read a list I made a year earlier, 31 December 2013 – I've probably glanced past it hundreds of times over the last year, but never really given it as much thought again as I'd applied to it last New Year's Eve. It was a list of skills I wanted to learn or improve, or at least work on really regularly, in 2014 (despite my precocious disdain for new year's resolutions, I even titled it 'Resolutions', so I'm either a fraud or was really lazy at naming files that night). For one or two of them, I'd done pretty well: I'm a much better runner than I was a year ago after training near-daily all year round, and my programming skills have grown quite a bit thanks to a lot of very deliberate practice. They were the exception, though – there are another five or six on the list that I'd classify as near-total failures (for one particularly self-involved example, I was incredibly determined to take up swimming after a good 15 years of staying firmly on land – I wanted to make it to the pool at least twice a week, and I haven't been at all since February). I've tried consoling myself with the fact that a couple of items on my list went really well, and that's probably more than a lot of people get, but the ones that I let slide bug me inordinately.
What really gets me is that none of them were what I'd always thought of as 'broken' commitments – I didn't just fail at them one day and give up on them; they were bouncing around in my mind for pretty much the whole year, and even in the periods when I knew I'd failed to keep up with some (or all...) of them, I was pretty constantly making plans to get back on the wagon. Those plans, too, ended up uncompleted. Most of it comes down to my own lack of commitment (I still can't escape the conclusion that if I was serious enough about them, I'd have found a way to make it work), and there's certainly an argument to be made that I took on too much, but what really drew my attention was the degree to which it felt like I was being driven by circumstances outside my control. Work and other similar commitments that I felt I couldn't really negotiate around ended up seeming so constraining that they're really the only lasting memories I have of the year. I was kind of stunned at how passive I'd been, in retrospect.
All of which is to say, I spent more time than I'd have liked yesterday thinking about the last year and what it was like to live through.
To be blunt, 2014 was pretty bleak. It was set against a backdrop of what felt like simply unrelentingly awful news and world events, obviously, which I imagine coloured how a lot of people perceived things. For me, professionally and personally, the year was really, monotonously dispiriting. A lot of the things I've worked on have involved some pretty disturbing circumstances and interactions, which I've never been good at dealing with, so that certainly didn't help. There were good moments, of course, but nothing that in hindsight can overpower the sense of stress and worry and tiredness I'm left with. It's ridiculously reductive, of course, but the year just feels like it was much harder work than it should have been. Considering what I wanted to do, and what it could have been, I feel really wasteful.
And to be clear, I have absolutely no right to complain about any of this. My failings are entirely my own fault, and frankly I have a really great life by any objective standards – I have a good job and a place to live, and there are far too many people who can't say that. Whining on my part is entirely trivial, but it does stem from things that clearly haven't been working for me, which I have the good fortune to be in a position to change, at least.
So, even if I don't believe in the magical power of a new calendar, I'm pretty stoked for this 1 January, far more than for previous ones. If nothing else, reading and overhearing other people all talking about what they're going to be doing differently this year is kind of nice. I quite like the thought of this collectively-applied end-point to the last period, and this pervasive sense that maybe there's a chance for things to get better from here on out, no matter how fleeting that'll prove to be. I hope a year from now I'll feel that this was borne out. Twelve months feels like a good unit of time to be able to assess how much you can change, so that's as good a resolution as I'm going to get this time around.