On Resolutions for the New Year
In truth there is no such thing in man’s nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.
~ Nathaniel Hawthorn
New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
~ Mark Twain
In life’s small things be resolute and great
To keep thy muscle trained: knowst thou when Fate
Thy measure takes, or when she’ll say to thee,
“I find thee worthy; do this deed for me?”
~ James Russell Lowell, Epigram
Good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.
~ Oscar Wilde
Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.
~ Benjamin Franklin
Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.
~ Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I made no resolutions for the New Year. The habit of making plans, of criticizing, sanctioning and molding my life, is too much of a daily event for me.
~ Anaïs Nin
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language
And next year’s words await another voice.
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
~ T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”
Time has no divisions to mark its passage, there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.
~ Thomas Mann
But can one still make resolutions when one is over forty? I live according to twenty-year-old habits.
~ Andre Gide
Still, I do have one resolution. I’ve been thinking about it for a while, and Rosei’s post gave me the occasion to put it into words:
I’m resolving to bring more energy and positivity into my life. My natural tendency is to be somewhat critical and melancholy. I’m comfortable with that. However, in the last year or two I have noticed that the anger level is rising, and I’m not comfortable with that. I don’t know how to deal with it, and it wears me down. It’s also pretty useless, since most of the things that anger me are beyond my control to change (except in very small ways…).
I used to be able to bring energy and comfort in with prayer, but that doesn’t really work for me anymore. So I’m adding some affirming messages to my daily meditations – with themes of gratitude, awareness and mindfulness, cosmic connection, energy, self-acceptance, etc. It’s a little Stuart Smalley, but that’s…. o-kay. It’s only a very modest kind of resolution, but it’s one I may be able to keep, unlike a few others that come to mind (smile).