You and I Are Too Old to Make New Year's Resolutions
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
New Year New You? Nope. That option happens every moment of every day our entire lives.
New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to work. Depending on the article and research you read,
-50% of resolutions are broken within the first two weeks. I went on to discover that by the end of January a full 95% of resolutions are abandoned.
Only 5% of New Years resolutions are kept beyond January.
-And yet, by some estimates, as many as 80% of people fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions by February. Only 8% of people stick with them the entire year.
-In fact, research goes on to show that 23% of people quit their resolution by the end of the first week, and 43% quit by the end of January
That’s depressing as hell considering how energetic so many of us are when we wake up on January 1st every year.
Quoting
here:“Can you imagine what life would be like if we woke up every single day with the same vigor we wake up with on January 1st?
The results would be astounding! We would always go to the gym. We would always eat healthy. We would always kill it at work or in business. We would always walk away from negativity and surround ourselves with only what’s good for us. And so on, and so on.
Maybe the world isn’t ready for that kind of amazing.
Or maybe, if you can’t do that every day of the year, quite possibly it’s just you who isn’t ready to be amazing.”
We aren’t ready to be amazing.
That’s a big takeaway and it gets to the heart of so much of why the above rather consistent stats argue: we begin our yearly journey with such good intentions. Then we discover the true hard work of consistency, maintenance and self-love.
Perhaps we aren’t ready for that kind of self-love.
But we most assuredly deserve it.
You and I are Way Too Old to write New Year’s Resolutions.
Why?
First, because we’ve written so damn many which were ditched, as per the above sad stats.
Second, because we have discovered too often that the lofty aspirations to which we point ourselves at the beginning of each year are not, perhaps, ours.
What?
Can we talk, please?
A great many resolutions that we write, we commit to because of other people. A spouse, a partner, a family member, someone whose approval we want. So we say we’re gonna (work out lose weight quit drinking blah blah blah).
In other words, while we may benefit from the resolution, it’s neither our idea, nor is it something that bubbled up most sincerely from inside us.
Until and unless we have something which came from deep within, a heart- and soul-felt desire to make a change or improve our condition, we will not and cannot sustain the work it takes.
To wit: for years and years, forty of them to be exact, I struggled with all kinds of eating disorders. Anorexia, bulimia, CHSP. For forty years, every January 1st I would commit to stopping, toss all my foodstuffs into the trash can and wipe my hands of it.
My doctors, my erstwhile boyfriends, various buddies and mentors pushed me to quit. I wanted to please them. I knew what was happening to my body. All common sense said STOP.
Yet by the morning of January 2nd, I was pulling all those packages of cookies and donuts out of the trash can and back into the house.
That shamed and horrified me, that I would sneak out in the dark of night and dumpster dive. Every single year.
I could commit to exercise, I could commit to lots of other things, but this, this one had me by the short and curlies.
I’ll bet many of you with extreme addictions or dependencies can relate.
Without the element of deep self-love, resolutions are worth the paper they are written on.
Not much.
Good intentions and the wonderful energy which accompanies the start of a brand-new year, the feeling of newness and resolve which energizes Easter, all of that is available to you and me every single moment of every single day.
New Year’s is a human construct to help us mark time. Nothing more and nothing less.
The truth is that you and I are remade every single moment. Because this:
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.
Our bodies are remaking themselves constantly. From moment to moment our thoughts and ideas are being remade. So the opportunity to be something/someone different doesn’t need a day to mark it.
That’s incredibly good news. But it also takes time, experience, and many years of failure to realize how useless New Year’s resolutions can be.
It takes even more Deep Work to understand that transformation is happening all the time inside us, as well as in our brains. We just don’t often see it.
The true failure is not realizing that simply waking up is such a gift. The rollout of yet another twenty-four hours is this generous red carpet, full of potential, portents and possibilities.
Every single day.
Where will you go today? Any day? Every single day?
Six days before my 58th birthday in 2011, I was sitting at a small desk in the tiny town of Trat in Thailand. I had big stacks of my favorite cookies, Tim Tams, on my desk, as I wrote in my diary.
As I had for years, I was chewing them up and spitting them out. Such a habit ties you forever to a single spot, just like my previous bulimia tied me to a toilet.
The embarrassment and shame which accompany such compulsions are just one reason that suicide is one of the handmaidens of eating disorders.
For this particular moment, a trip out to the islands had been delayed and I had done what I always do with a little extra time: I found a bunch of sweet shit and was consuming it as I had done for forty years.
This was a day like all others. And suddenly it wasn’t.
I wrote:
You can be doing this when you are 95. Or you can stop right now.
Suddenly I got up, loaded all the cookies into my arms, marched them downstairs and handed all the packages to the staff.
I never had an issue with an eating disorder again. Not once. Not even tempted.
That day, January 11, 2011, was the day that changed my life forever. I was free of the most brutal and dangerous obsessive-compulsive disorder on the planet. After forty years, I was done.
This time, the commitment came from my soul. It was absolute.
From there, it was two years before I stood, triumphant, at the top of Kilimanjaro.
By the end of my sixtieth year I had thrown myself full-tilt into adventure travel all over the world as an athlete.
We never ever know what doors we open when we say yes to ourselves, our health, our lives. At any age.
You are never EVER Too Old to completely retool your life.
The resolve to recreate yourself is within you.
I’m not going to insult your intelligence by saying “all you gotta do is X” to take your life in hand and make the kinds of changes which will lead you to a life you imagine will be better.
Hell, took me forty years, what do I know, right?
When your heart is ready, when your soul has decided, you will make a move. But not until then. As Kristi wrote, time to be amazing.
That’s our birthright. To love ourselves enough to give ourselves permission to be amazing. To do whatever we came here to do, in our unique way, offer our gifts to the world and stop apologizing for being born.
I believe, and this doesn’t make me right, that this is why so many resolutions don’t work. You will do what you say you will do when you are ready to take better care of yourself.
Age is no excuse to avoid the work. If anything, that’s a prime motivator, for we are using up the time given to us all day every day. And each day not lived in full is a day we can’t get back. Aren’t you worth the effort?
I think so.
When you know in every cell of your being that you are worth the investment in whatever it is that you say you want to do: more exercise, better eating habits, spending more time with your family, more time in Nature, you will do it.
I beat this drum constantly because I need to hear it myself:
You and I were worth loving the moment we drew breath. You and I were and still are worth taking the best care of every day, all day. The older we get, the more we need that kind of self-care. The more we deserve the self-love which only we can give ourselves.
It’s not this year I’m gonna. It’s every second of every single day.
I suggest instead that you allow for the innate wisdom which informs all of us to find its way to your heart. Your soul. When you are ready, it will come.
It may come to you in tiny drips, small steps.
It may be a complete shift, as it was for me. Doesn’t matter.
It will come. And you will know the moment you are ready.
I wish you and yours a safe and gorgeous weekend, celebrate responsibly.
Above all, give yourself permission to find your way to your best life. When you are ready, let it rise inside you.
Thank you for spending a few precious seconds of your life with me this weekend. I hope this was worth your while. If so, please consider
If you know someone who needs a boost, please consider
Either way my heartfelt gratitude. Please take care of yourself as this brand new year reaches us yet again.
My resolution is daily, January 1 is simply an opportunity to remind myself that my resolution is daily.
That resolution? Be kind. Especially to ourselves.
Sometimes it's very difficult.
It is STUNNING that you were able to let go, all at once, of 40 years of disordered eating — guess that is a real testament to what's possible when we are truly, deeply, ready for change.
As for my take on Kristi Keller's vision of New Year's Day energy: on New Year's Day, I will have all that energy and all those wondrous intentions to reconfigure my schedule, my body, my work, my habits, my everything — beginning on January 2. The nice thing about aging is that I'm onto myself by now, so I don't fall for it. Small changes, when I'm truly ready and willing, are what make a difference.