Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! This is, of course, the day of the year picked arbitrarily and more or less accepted as the opportunity for a new start. A fresh beginning. The holiday is our general consensus that self-reflection and self-improvement are worthwhile pursuits. Good for us, I say.

New Years, really, is a western attempt at practicing mindfulness, where we embrace our impending mortality and recognize how quickly life can slip away if we do not take a moment to reflect on where and who we are, were, and wish to be. New Years self reflection is a beautiful concept, really, and as we all have so much room for growth it never stops to puzzle me that we celebrate these new beginnings by donning diapers for a party and embarking on this brave new year with a hangover.

But at least maybe it’s honest. Resolutions, of course, are up there with extravagant birthday celebrations as among our dumbest traditions. But it’s not that the impulse to take stock and improve our lives and habits is silly, but that abandoning our resolutions is as much a part of the cliche and the tradition as making them. “I should lose weight,” or “go to the gym more,” or “be better with money” are not ignoble goals, but are simply terribly defined. It fails to consider scale.

Meaningful lifestyle change needs to step from an earnest interest in making it. And an earnest interest in effecting that change will take shape when it is time, not on January 1st. A ceremonial embrace of a present and improved self, one which swirls around a single day, should center on a single, discrete action.

That doesn’t mean this thing you decide to do can’t be meaningful. Ask for the raise. Reach out to an estranged friend. Or just kick of 2019 with a perfectly clean refrigerator. And then go on with your year and make yourself better or don’t, but let’s stop standing on ceremony so we can all take each other a bit more seriously.