#10 / Resolve
Hi everyone,
This week I realized that I have been doing New Year’s Resolutions all wrong.
For most of my life I wasn’t doing them at all. I always thought it was totally arbitrary that January 1 should be the day that we all decide to change our habits. We should pursue self-improvement year-round! And can’t we see, strolling past a once-again-empty gym on January 23, how obvious it is that our arbitrary goal-setting system is not even the least bit effective?
Over time I have become even more jaded and existentialist, to the point that I have lost the stomach to crusade against arbitrariness. It’s all arbitrary anyway, right? What’s so wrong with choosing one arbitrary date over another arbitrary date? I might as well embrace it, and in doing so come off my soapbox.
It was with this new mindset that, about three years ago now, in the halcyon days of January 2020—when the only global issues to deal with were minor matters like Australia burning down and the U.S. and Iran threatening to kick off World War III—I found myself excitedly planning out a New Year’s Resolution.
I wanted to go to bed earlier. I wanted to go to bed earlier so that I could get up earlier, and I wanted to get up earlier so I could get some writing done before work.
I’d been doing that off and on, but mostly just when circumstances allowed, rather than through my own planning and effort. When I commuted downtown with Ashley during her residency, for instance, we’d arrive in time for her to start her shift at 8 AM, while I didn’t have to start until 9. Given an extra hour, it was (relatively) easy for me to spend it writing. I missed that.
I knew three things about myself by this point: I write better in the morning, I dawdle before bed, and when I have accountability I’m capable of consistently getting up early. Dawdling before bed makes me more likely to snooze my alarm or lie in bed instead of getting up. So the key was going to sleep on time, and I figured that since it happened to be the new year, I might as well officially make it a Resolution. (I waited in vain for my formal Resolution Certificate after mailing in my application, only to learn that the Resolution Department was brutally understaffed due to budget cuts and a backlog of federal appointees.)
I had some success with it. I knew I needed to make it specific, so I said I’d be in bed by 9:30 to read, and asleep (at least lights out) by 10:30. But I had it in my head, as an unexamined assumption, that I should be doing this every night. When that didn’t happen, I started to relax my requirements.
Maybe getting in bed by 10 was good enough. And when that didn’t happen consistently, I decided that as long as I turned the lights off by 11—or perhaps a little later—it would still be progress.
I’m sure that, on the whole, I have been going to bed earlier and getting up earlier in 2020 as compared to 2019 and 2018. But was I thinking about it this way? Of course not. I was busy feeling ashamed every day I failed to hit my goal. After a while I kinda forgot I’d made a resolution at all.
I have a predisposition toward playing with words. And one recent evening, stressing once again about how to cajole myself into bed, I remembered that day when, as a much younger man, I had dared to enter into the record what I now understood to be a toweringly ambitious New Year’s Resolution.
And I began idly toying with that phrase, “New Year’s Resolution,” and I wondered: what if the most important word in it is not the “new” but the “year?”
What if I didn’t have to immediately fulfill the resolution on January 1? What if, instead, I had all year to work toward it?
That would be fantastic.
All these people killing themselves to go to the gym every wintry day of dreaded January, and me too— we are fooling ourselves!
At once I realized how this new interpretation could, much more effectively, help me actually achieve my goal.
What if, rather than aiming for 9:30 from the start, I slowly go to bed earlier and earlier, even a couple minutes earlier each week? Spacing out the change gradually and in increments, I can easily get to where I want to be by the end of 2020 (if it somehow ever comes).
Or I could start by going to bed at 9:30 twice a week, do that for a month, and then up it to three, and then four, until I’m doing it every night (or perhaps I give myself a free night every week—it’s all on the table now).
To be honest I haven’t made any such plans yet. It feels like enough just to let myself of the hook for failing at my resolution. It feels good to recognize the progress I have made, and the fact that I’m aware of this dilemma at all. Trying to change myself overnight, when all my experience tells me that this is impossible and probably not even desirable, is only self-defeating. It’s an old pattern, and it’s definitely not any fun.
Writing
Yesterday was my Zayde Alan’s birthday. He would have been 98 years old. (Actually, he would say that he was now in his 99th year.)
Almost eight years ago, on a windy Saturday in October, Ashley and I got married. We woke up excited and anxious for the ceremony. Zayde woke up in the hospital. But he was determined to make it to the wedding. We never had a doubt that he would; we also never saw, busy as we were with preparations, the incredible effort that went into getting him there.
The whole family took photos with Zayde before the ceremony, and he watched proudly as Ashley and I exchanged vows. We toasted him from the sweetheart table during dinner. I can still see him smiling.
Immediately after the wedding, he went into hospice, and a couple weeks later he passed away. And this is what I said when we laid him to rest.
He was a poet and a philosopher and basically just what you would call a good dude, and I couldn’t do any of it without him.
Reading
Alright, well I guess this is the week that I get real with y’all.
Austin Kleon — Not Everything Will Be Okay (But Some Things Will)
My Zayde was a pretty damn positive person, but even he would annoyed by some of this wishful thinking and willful blindness.
Have you seen these yard signs in your neighborhood?
Everything will be OK
I’m sure these people mean well, but we all know that isn’t true. (And I’d bet these people are white; statistically, everything is more likely to be OK if you’re white.)
Kleon:
People are dying. Our leaders are corrupt. Things are not good.
But there’s still sunshine and birds and Gene Kelly dancing.
If we are going to paint the neighborhood with slogans, let’s at least honor each other’s grief and intelligence.
everything will be okay.NOT everything will be okay BUT SOME THINGS WILL.
Ibram X. Kendi — We’re Still Living and Dying in the Slaveholders’ Republic
Slaveholders desired a state that wholly secured their individual freedom to enslave, not to mention their freedom to disenfranchise, to exploit, to impoverish, to demean, and to silence and kill the demeaned. The freedom to. The freedom to harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom to infect.
Slaveholders disavowed a state that secured any form of communal freedom—the freedom of the community from slavery, from disenfranchisement, from exploitation, from poverty, from all the demeaning and silencing and killing. The freedom from. The freedom from harm. Which is to say, in coronavirus terms, the freedom from infection.
The slaveholder’s freedom to seceded from Lincoln’s “house divided against itself”—divided between the freedom to and from. Memminger was named the Confederate secretary of the Treasury. Americans went to war. Americans are still waging this same war, now over COVID-19. There is a war between those fighting to open America back up for the sake of individual freedom, and those fighting to keep America closed for the sake of community freedom. A civil war over the very meaning, the very utility of freedom.
Adrienne LaFrance — The Prophecies of Q
The Atlantic has been putting out incredible stuff the past couple months. I have to warn you: this piece is long and it is chilling. But it’s gripping reporting and storytelling; I couldn’t stop reading. The argument is that the growing QAnon conspiracy theory needs to be taken very seriously. Couple this with the recent ADL report that 2019 showed the highest number of anti-Semitic incidents on record, and I’m convinced.
Block Club Chicago — Monty and Rose, Chicago’s Piping Plover Pair, Return to Montrose Beach
OK, I have to end this on a lighter note. Here’s a fun tale of a couple nutty endangered birds who last year made their nest on one of Chicago’s most bustling beaches. They’re back, and this time, thank goodness, the beach is empty.
If you click through to the 2019 article it links to, you can see video of their mating dance. These are some weird-ass birds.
Mood
Don’t get a black market haircut.
Darling don’t you go and cut your hair
Do you think it’s gonna make him change?
Cut Your Hair - song by Pavement | Spotify
Pavement · Song · 1994
Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron