For some reason making a New Year’s Resolution was particularly hard this year, my thirty-ninth. For one thing I had so many things I wanted to fix about myself: I wanted to reduce my drinking, give up smoking, try - once again - to lose weight, sleep normally without pills, get fit (whatever that is!), eat healthily, get out of debt, regain my sense of smell, fix my sex-life, stop telling pointless lies, stop being unnecessarily argumentative with my spouse, and become magically able to handle my job without obsessive perfectionism and pointless worry and exhaustion.
For another thing I also had so many positive things that I wanted to achieve this year: I wanted to learn the piano, take up knitting (maybe even crochet), have more dinner parties, try to regain my lost knowledge of Latin, record myself singing, paint more consistently and improve my technique, find a publisher for my dissertation, climb a small mountain, figure out what to do with my hair, and make a final, firm and mutually happy decision about whether or not to try for a baby.
Lastly, I had a whole other list of reasons why I would probably not accomplish any of the above: I have no time, I have tried before and failed, I am too old, I am too lazy, I lack commitment, I am just me and I suck. And so, instead of making any firm New Year’s Resolution, I wallowed in self-loathing, self-pity and apathy. My thinking being that if I did not make any resolutions, I would not have to waste energy beating myself up when I, inevitably, broke them.
When I woke up on January 1st, 2009 I had a huge hangover and a very bruised pinky toe on my left foot (don’t ask I can’t really remember), and no motivation to do anything about myself whatsoever, or so I thought. Here I am four days later, not had a drink or cigarette, lost six pounds, 40 rows down an “interesting” looking scarf, exercising on my Wii, eating pounds of vegetables and even some fruit, learning to waltz with my hubby (with whom I have had far fewer spats by the way), and I actually feel quite happy. Scary, even writing those words down makes me feel like I might jinx it.
What on earth is going on? I can only assume that faced with all the life-changing stuff I wanted to accomplish this year some part of my brain made a unilateral decision that I could not handle the pressure and conned me into passivity while it just got down to business. I guess that what I wanted was not actually all of those things listed above or even any of them individually; I needed a new way of looking at things - no, not just things - everything. But, don't get me wrong, I am not looking for a new me and nor do I need to find myself. I already knew who I am, and at the heart of things I think I am pretty okay (excuse me while I bowl you over with me self-esteem). In some ways what I needed was a to-do-list for my life, which makes sense, I have one at work and could not function without it. Now, I understand that putting things on a to-do-list and actually doing them are two different things, but it is a start. The next step I suppose would be scheduling - wow, I am talking about running my life as a business.
What I need is self-control. If you are like me, you will probably always have associated self-control with the deprivation of desires, and not with something that actually promoted happiness and creativity. I, of course, am not the first to realize that our desires seldom make us happy - I think that was Buddha - but cut me some slack, knowing stuff like that and actually trying to apply it to ones life are two different things. For too long I have felt that I was being pulled along by my life – racing, lurching and swerving behind my personal runaway train. It has brought me to some good places, as lives go, mine is actually pretty amazing, I have a great job, wonderful parents who love me and I am a newly married to a great guy. So I guess what I am going through maybe a classic case of "done everything I set out to do - now what" syndrome (copyright pending :-{), or more simply - a mid-life crisis. Can I have one of those when I am still in my thirties?
Anyway, as I lay in the bath this evening it occurred to me (and not for the first time I assure you) that I will be forty in six months – on June 25th to be precise – and, as my friend, Kate, was fond of saying, "Life is not a dress-rehearsal". So I decided (why do all great decisions come when the body is immersed in water - wasn't Churchill famous for calling the shots from his bathtub) - anyway, I digress because I want to avoid commitment on paper (monitor, whatever) - so I decided to try - no, scratch that - to accomplish self-control and get behind the wheel of my runaway train: I will give myself a year – my six months either side of forty.
No comments:
Post a Comment