Resolutions revisited

It's hard to believe I've been writing this blog for two years. It barely feels like I've bee writing it for one at this point - admittedly I'm very bad at feeling the passage of time, both on minor and major scales. Back when I had just barely started, I wrote about New Year's Resolutions, and why I don't really like them, and what I think would be a better way of going about it. I don't necessarily disagree with the things that I said, and I still think that the new year is a bad time to start something new. But, I also have a new appreciation for what resolving to do something in the new year is for.

In 2016, along with the people from Be a Game Character that I had come to know and love, I made a series of resolutions for the year. And I will say right here and now, I did not succeed in a single one of them. What I did do, however, was make a significant amount of progress on all of them, at least in part because I had made those resolutions and therefore had them constantly in the back of my mind. And most of the resolutions I made were based on things that I was already doing and working on, and I had wanted to do for a very long time.

I think that's the real reason that so many people fail on their resolutions and permanently give them up a week into the year. They try to make life changing choices, rather than set a goal in something that they're already working on. And I mean, I can understand that. The weight thing is huge for most people, and after the holidays, of course you want to get rid of that. But just saying that isn't going to do a whole lot. Nor is just jumping into a gym routine that you don't fully understand. As someone who has been losing weight over the last few months, I did enormous amounts of research into both exercise and dieting before I was able to make an actual difference. And I mean, it's not a complicated thing in reality, but it is a very easy thing to mess up and make worse. You can't go into a gym and pick up a hundred pounds of something and just start moving it and expect to not hurt yourself.

I think the point of a resolution is to give yourself something to work towards, not to say where you're going to start. You need to start today, or yesterday. You can't say in advance when you're going to start, because then if you miss the first day you're never going to hit the rest. It should be a rededication to what you already want to do. And so should be everyday after that.