New Year's Resolutions?

I understand the instinct to make New Year's resolutions. You come to the end of one year and the beginning of the next, and it feels like the time to re-set a variety of things in your life. That makes sense to me. Even for people like me, who truly, madly, deeply love the holiday season, it's an exhausting time when you tend to let a lot of the little things slide in favor of the madness. You get busy. If you're like me and work for a financial institution, you get busy at work, as well as at life in general. You likely don't get enough sleep, you're likely spending money like a fiend, you're running yourself ragged in a million different ways. And then, snap! It's over. And you're left with a feeling that you want to get things back in order. So...you make resolutions. They might be quite lofty, or they might be mundane and simple.

Either way, here's the thing about resolutions. They...don't last. I mean, I'm sure I could come up with examples of people who've successfully stuck to their resolutions, if I tried. I'm sure I even have, a time or two. But by and large, as the year goes on, life takes over and the resolutions fade to the background. That's the nature of life.

So, what I like to do instead is to recognize January 1st for what it is - a new beginning. I try to put all my petty grievances of the prior year behind me and start fresh. I try to forgive myself for letting things slide for that last six weeks of the year, and especially for that extra five pounds my mom's and mother in law's delicious holiday eats (not to mention the extra booze) helped me pack on and just say, "Ok. Here's my opportunity for a fresh start."

I try to do this at work, too, of course, but it's harder to implement since returning from the holidays launches us immediately into month-quarter-year-end madness. But I'm trying anyway, because miring myself in negativity doesn't help anyway, so why not focus on the positive? Why not focus on the new department head who actually seems to take an interest in my career development? Why not focus on the opportunities he's already created for me? Why not focus on the potential positives the mentoring I took part in last year may yield as the company begins to recover from the bad times? Heck, why not focus on the fact that, as this new year begins, the company isn't laying off my coworkers every other week?

We'll see how it goes.