THE IDEA of making New Year’s resolutions never fails to amuse both the people who make them and those who find them ridiculous.
To be sure, what we list down are the same old things we wanted to accomplish and the same old habits we wanted to break the previous year, a solid proof of the futility of New Year’s resolutions.
As fitting as it is to start the year with sugar-coated optimism, I’m afraid I have to do otherwise. When the year started, my disillusioned self didn’t even have the slightest inclination to create the year’s list. I’m almost naturally pessimistic. Don’t get me wrong. There are things in this world that need drastic change, but like many resolutions, solutions to the many problems in the government, the society and the world at large, are left to collect dust once the enthusiasm drops and motivation ceases. But then, it is relative upon the person who creates the list if by the end of the year it doesn’t just end up as another dog-eared page of “I-should-haves in someone’s journal.
It is fascinating how once you have forgotten the list exists, resolutions cease to exist. Perhaps the same idea doesn’t only apply to New Year’s resolutions’, it applies to everything else: promises, memories, people.
As for now, maybe you should start cleaning up your room or working some exercise into your daily routine. Or maybe not. Not this year, at least.
Sure enough, more lists were born at the beginning of this year, while more people literally burned their hard-earned money on firecrackers and fireworks displays, another New Year conundrum. You can always count on so-called traditions like these to irk and to fascinate people, even as early as the first day of the year.
