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Top Comments: Retroactive New Year's Resolutions [1]

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Date: 2023-01-22

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In late January, it may seem a discussion about new year’s resolutions is not timely, but, given that a series of COVID infections has delayed Christmas for my in-laws until February, the relevance of time is not what it used to be. Plus, as you’ll see (if you bear with me), the irrelevance of time is kind of the point of this diary.

Let me start off by saying that Ed Tracey’s suggestions regarding new year’s resolutions are practical and likely to bring about success. However, I’m going to propose a way to short-circuit the whole process. Let me also say that, for many years now, I have not bothered to make any such resolutions. I’ve felt that if someone recognizes the need to change their life, they ought to proceed to do so regardless of what time of year it may happen to be.

Be that as it may, an idea occurred to me late last year as I thought about my accomplishments. On December 31, 2022, I resolved to lose 12 pounds in 2022. (Take care to note the year here.) At the beginning of 2022, I had no specific plans to lose a significant amount of weight, though I recognized that I could stand to some, and, further, improve my physical condition. At that time, my exercise routine was a long walk every evening with Hubby; while doing this works to improve heart health, for me at least, it doesn’t do much for conditioning or weight loss. My preferred exercise is actually swimming, but it turns out that the charming town we retired to does not have a community pool that allows for lap swimming. The alternative was to join a YMCA in a neighboring town about 15 miles away, but I didn’t want to have to drive that far.

Then I acquired a case of plantar fasciitis in my right foot, which made even short walks difficult to tolerate. I was sitting around the house unable to do any exercise at all. At Hubby’s insistence, we joined the YMCA, and for the first time since before the start of the pandemic, I resumed swimming. That was back in late August. Since then, I’ve been swimming 3 times a week, and I’m up to 2,700 yards per workout. As a result, I subsequently lost weight I wasn’t expecting to back in January 2022.

And there’s the point. At the beginning of the year, while you may have hopes for what you would like to achieve, you don’t know what’s actually going to happen. Rather than make a resolution for the year at the beginning of the year, wait for the end of the year, consider what happened and what you achieved, pick one of them, and assert that as your resolution for that year. At the beginning of 2022, I had no idea I would be losing 12 pounds, but now that I’ve lost them, I realize that it wouldn’t have been a bad idea to have made a resolution to do that. A big advantage is that, doing it this way, you’ll always keep your resolutions.

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