New Year's Resolutions

Every January thousands of people make resolutions. Some start visiting a gym or join Weight Watchers. Some give up smoking or tear up credit cards to prevent shopping sprees. Studies show that for most individuals, the failure to keep New Year's resolutions hovers somewhere between 78% and 88%. We are truly creatures of habit, and those habits that are most deeply embedded in the wiring of our brains are the hardest to break.

Still almost half of us make New Year's Resolutions every year despite the daunting odds, demonstrating that perhaps the easiest New Year's resolution to make is to resolve to continue making New Year's resolutions.

A week ago, on the first day of 2012, I participated in this annual ritual, but the most important resolution I made was this: I promised myself that I would appreciate what I have.

It sounds like a simple proposition, but it's not easy to put into practice.

People tend to take what they have for granted. We forget that the very senses we possess-- sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—form our essential connections to the world around us. Isolated in an office or a car or our living rooms, we cannot experience the warmth or cold of the weather; the rustle of trees or the cry of a bird; the smell of freshly mowed grass or the taste of a ripe blackberry growing wild along the road.

But it's not just the physical world that eludes our consciousness. Too often, we find ourselves talking to people but not really listening to what they say. Before anyone has had a chance to finish a sentence or two, we're already formulating a response, thinking about our next appointment, or worse yet, surreptitiously glancing at our cell phones. And if we are truly honest with ourselves, very few of us can remember the last time we just sat on a park bench and did nothing at all except be in the moment, exercising a deliberate awareness of everything around us.

This past December I realized that I was spending far too much of my own life in this kind of sensory and social deprivation. Like Lewis Carroll's White Queen, I was running as fast as I could only to stay in the same place, and worst of all, I was losing my sense of connection to the people I love.

So New Year's Day has come and gone, and I still have this resolution to fulfill. While I'm riding my bike, I feel the crispness of the air rushing past. When I'm out walking the dogs, I smile at the people who are approaching me on the sidewalk. When I'm with friends, I try to take a moment and think how lucky I am to have them and how lonely my world would be without them. When my kids are driving me crazy, I try to stop myself from yelling at them and remember to give them a hug because I love them.

Of course, my efforts to appreciate what I have are often thwarted by the small insults and irritations of daily life: a driver cuts me off; I'm infuriated by some irrational act of Congress; my son leaves his shoes where I can trip on them for the umpteenth time; my husband fails to understand my directive to leave silverware in the side of the sink where forks and spoons won't fall into the garbage disposal and get chewed up.

And then there are the twin distractions of fear and envy: What if I can't pay my bills this month? What if my new business never works out? Why can't I afford to remodel my house like everyone else? Why don't I have the relatives with cabin near Tahoe? Those distractions can keep me suspended in a feverish anxiety about a possible future that may or may not ever come true.

But in reality all of us only ever experience the present moment. Today, this house, this family, these friends, these possessions are all that I have, and I can choose to see them as sufficient for now or choose to disparage them because they don't live up to my expectations of what might be.

The Gospel according to Matthew puts the case this way: “Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” (6:4).

I don't advocate living my life with no thought of the future, and my focus on what is sufficient looks more towards the joy than the pain of daily living, but the apostle's sense of where we might best invest our attention is exactly on the mark. All I have is today, and with luck, the tomorrow that will become today. That's why my resolution is more than a New Year's ritual; it's a resolution I am making for my life to be the best it can be right now.