Going on a Quest

It’s rather late in the year already for a New Year’s Resolutions post, and it turns out it’s also late for a Quitter’s Day post—traditionally, the second Friday in January is when most people give up on their bold ambitions to make this Their Year. In my heart of hearts, I was hoping we’d all stick it out to mid-February, which is why I’m thinking about this now. Oh well! I’m trucking on regardless.

The new year might be the only “holiday” I actually participate in, besides Halloween. Sometimes on the summer patriotism holidays I’ll crack a beer and listen to John Prine on the porch, which is definitely not the standard celebration so I don’t think it counts. I don’t do resolutions all that correctly either. I like to start thinking about them in the weird week after Christmas and put them in a list in my notes app, more of a brainstorming process than a formal declaration that that’s what’s up for the year. Once the calendar changes over, I have a pretty good list of what I do care about. I try for a balance between one-time actions and long-term habitual changes.

Where I diverge from the mainstream is that I actually go back and look every so often. I’ve already completed one! I wanted to travel by Amtrak at least once and I took a day trip to Lancaster to eat an ungodly amount of pastry and walk around. Awesome start. Sometimes I’ll have completely forgotten about one, and at that moment I get to decide if I’m going to get back on the horse, or ditch it because it wasn’t the right goal for me at this time. At the end of the year, I go through all of them and mark each one as success or failure or in-between.

I’ve been keeping this list since 2019 and my success rate is consistently about 50%. A lot of the failures are just things that weren’t quite a fit for my life, or random “that would be cool” ideas that I never took action on. One of these was that I wanted to “handle a large bird” in 2024. Failing to find a falconry class isn’t really a knock on my determination or anything. That’s also a decent example for how fluffy and inconsequential some of these resolutions are. One that I think I’m going to succeed at this year is “only buy natural peanut butter”, because I eat a SHOCKING amount of peanut butter and if I only get the glass jar stuff that needs stirring, I’ll be consuming way less environmentally devastating palm oil and hopefully dial it back a bit for budgetary reasons. As an added bonus, they’re nice jars! I’m saving some of them because I’m also on a pickling kick. I keep the resolutions pretty specific and measurable—look up what a SMART goal is for help on this, but it’s straightforward enough: if you can’t define your desired outcome clearly, you can’t tell if you ever succeeded or not.

People go nuts over resolutions because a new calendar year is a natural place to go for a new start. Duh! But they’re really just goals. Nobody ever has to know what yours are if sharing doesn’t help you commit. The nice thing is, the only consequence of failing is that you didn’t succeed. You don’t have to pay a fine, nobody comes to arrest you. You just didn’t do it. Quit whenever you want! Make a resolution so easy you can’t fail! You’re an adult! The double-edged sword is that you get to (have to) decide what you want, and how to get there.

Homework for you:

Make a resolution that’s goofy. Share with the class!