No New Year’s Resolutions
I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. Instead, I prefer to think that I am setting new goals for myself in the coming year. What’s the difference? A resolution is “a firm decision to do or not do something.” A goal is “the object of a person’s ambition or effort, an aim or desired result.” I think my issue with resolution comes in the word firm. That makes the idea of keeping to resolution sound so strict, so harsh, so inflexible. To do or not do something is binary. It’s black and white. By profession, I am a music theorist. My nature as a theorist is to live in the gray areas of music. Actually, I like the gray area of most things. Its the place where I can look at something from multiple perspectives, see possibilities, make not so obvious connections. Perhaps the bottom line with my attitudes toward making and keeping a New Year’s resolution is that there is no creativity involved in the process. Again, either you keep the resolution and are “successful.” Or, you don’t keep the resolution and you have failed. There has to be something between failure and success when it comes to New Year’s resolutions!
Goals, on the other hand, don’t feel so rigid. It seems to me like in setting a goal, I am tasked with deciding what is important to me and figuring out what I can do to work toward reaching a desired result. The path to that desired goal may not be obvious at the outset. Reaching a goal requires constant and creative engagement from me through the entire process of working toward that end. If I feel like I am not making progress, I have the freedom to re-evaluate both my process and the goal itself. Flexibility. Gray area. Creativity. That is the difference to me. I need goals.
I have set a few goals for myself for 2017.
- To be more intentional with how I spend my time.
- To write regularly.
- To knit more than in 2016.
