Resolute About Not Making Resolutions

Ten days in to the shiny new year is often when folk find their resolve for the resolutions they made on January 1st is waning. Not everyone, some find the symbolism of the start of a new year the perfect time to kick old habits or adopt new ones. But for me the beginning of the year has rarely been a date associated with successful eradication of bad habits.

I tend to feel that if i am ready to leave a certain behaviourism behind then the date is irrelevant, the desire to change is the key at any time of year. When I quit smoking nearly seven and a half years ago it was in the middle of September. Not quite an arbitrary date as I gave up on the day I began my PhD. Looking back this seems an insane idea, to try to stop smoking on the very day I embarked on the toughest academic challenge of my life, one which brought teaching and intensive study into my life and might therefore have seen me smoking more cigarettes a day if I’d kept the habit up. Maybe that’s what I was worried about. I already smoked way too many a day.

I was successful and have never smoked another cigarette in all that time. I do not consider myself a non-smoker, just a smoker who has controlled his addiction for seven and a half years. It’s the only way I know how to ignore those occasionally still loud voices at the back of my head telling me it would be ok if I just had a cigarette now and then, when I really feel like one. I do still have cravings, which is why this voice can be heard. But I also know that one cigarette will lead to a whole lot more. I cannot smoke one and then not want another for a year or so. I enjoyed smoking, unlike all those who say they hated the habit before giving up. I miss it. I never hated it, only ever hated the effect it has had on the fragile health of my already struggling  lungs. That is why I won’t smoke again but it is a battle I have to regularly remind myself of, can never relax about.

This year there are far less dramatic or dangerous changes I might wish to make. I no longer want to be married but that’s not so much a resolution as a letting go of the past. I’m eating less red meat but that has been a gradual change over the past six months anyway. I crave fish a lot more. Bad news for fish but quite good news for my body. I’m writing more and hope to continue that trend. I want to spend more happy times in the company of good friends and perhaps to finally get round to that trip to Paris I’ve been promising myself for something like 25 years.

These are not resolutions, they are just aims. Perhaps it is unavoidable that we consider changes as the year turns but I am very much focused on slow transformation rather than on sudden and potentially equally reversible habit-curbing. If my life were a desert I might want to water it but it is not. It is a city garden full of colours and hidden delights. If I need to resolve anything it should be to appreciate the garden of my life as often as I possibly can.

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