My New Year's resolution this year is easy: In 2005, I'm just going to do everything. Everything I was going to do last year but didn't, and everything from the year before that, too. I figure going back two years should cover me for my most egregious lapses, and any promises I made to myself before that shall hereby be null and void. This is just to simplify things, but also because I'm a big believer in amnesty, and, hey, it's my self-improvement plan.
The only reason I didn't improve myself last year was that I didn't write stuff down. Obviously. Because none of this is hard. You just have to get organized. It's important to have a list so you remember how you don't measure up to your own standards -- so as to best avoid drowning in your own pathetic pool of denial.
-- Resolution No. 1: No more denial, baby. Face it. You're a slob. Your office is a mess, and so is the inside of your car. Also, you're going to get high blood pressure if you don't pay better attention to aerobic conditioning. Also, you're a pig. Really, blue cheese dressing on your salad? From now on, you get a squirt of lemon juice, and don't even think about adding croutons.
-- Resolution No. 2: Okay, you really need to stop beating yourself up all the time. Go easy. Stop expecting so much. Relax! Stop making so many to-do lists, because they just stress you out, which inevitably leads to your putting blue cheese dressing on your salad, and also to mental exhaustion, which causes you to lose your will to clean your office and car.
-- No. 3: But you need lists.
-- No. 4: No, you don't!
-- No. 5: Stop talking to yourself. You're driving yourself crazy.
Ack! Just how many voices do I have in here in this headache of mine? This is the thing about coming up with New Year's resolutions. You discover so many competing selves. And all of them are more or less wrong.
One of the top things I want to do this year is integrate. The good life is not about achievement, not about crossing tasks off a list, not about acquisition or even reaching one's target heart rate zone for 30 minutes five days a week. The good life is all about balance. So: Call your mother. Play with your kids. Meet your deadlines. Answer your e-mail. Do charity work. Learn Chinese. Go to church. Pull weeds. Reach target heart rate zone. (But don't forget strength conditioning.) No blue cheese. Brush your dog. Get regular dental checkups. Get a makeover. Clean your office and your car.
It's just a balancing act. All you really need to do is assign weight to these things. Prioritize! (I thought you were going to stop using faddish words like that.) (Oh, what-ever.) Color-coding could help. Since pulling weeds is not as important as calling your mother, you could put "mother" in red and "weeds" in a pastel yellow color and "deadlines" in a serious brown tone, and all of this could be on a big wall chart so as to provide an at-a-glance guide to how to best spend your time on any given day.
Notice you are making a list again.
Also, you are talking to yourself again.
Nag, nag, nag. Certainly the most annoying self that gets activated when embarking on any self-improvement plan is your inner whiner. Sort of like the teacher who never let up, the coach who kept assigning more push-ups. It's the irritating superego to your good ol' id. She's in there and she's got teeth. Is this really who you want escorting you into the new year? Don't you have enough people harassing you in your life? This is how your life gets so messed up in the first place. Everybody nagging: your kids, your mother, your colleagues, your boss, your credit card companies, your balding tires, your bathroom scale, the little lights on your elliptical machine telling you that you have not yet reached your target heart rate zone. And you keep promising the nags, you keep saying, Yup, I'll get right on that.
That is it! That right there is my whole problem in a nutshell. I think I may have just discovered my most important New Year's resolution, the one thing I need to do that will set me up to become a better person in 2005: I need to learn how to say, "No."
