A New Approach to Resolutions

New Year's resolutions are a common and often thoughtless ritual, destined for fast failure.

Hear me out on this: Most New Year's resolutions don't even make it a week.

Why?

Big Sky, Montana. Backcountry snowshoeing. Blazing a new trail and making tracks into the new year.

My thought is that it's because resolutions aren't really given the serious conviction they deserve. Like a lot of things in our society and culture, it's just a routine expectation that isn't taken seriously. If you want to make a change whether an important weighted intention or a light and more casual approach, you don't really need to wait for a certain time of the year or the stars to perfectly align. If it means something, you do it when you need or want to do it. Also, making an overly detailed plan can be a monstrously overwhelming approach to something that wasn't even close to complex as can trying to surmount far too many changes at once. This can lead to a lot of unwanted and unneeded stress and anxiety.

Still, the momentum of peers and society can be a beneficial wave that one can use to their advantage. A person can get swept up in the speed but chose their own vehicle of transport and negotiate the turns in their own way. You can take what you need, when you need it and apply it to when it's most applicable for you and best suited. I don't usually do New Year's resolutions. I haven't for several decades now. However, I have a new spin I'm trying this year, born of rumored old ways. It's not very detailed and boiled down to simplicity to set it up for anticipated success, bucking the system in true Rustic Crone fashion, of course.

I built a fire, stoked it up nicely and wrote down thirteen things I felt I wanted to work on this coming year. I mixed them up and started randomly putting them in the hearth fire until I had but one left. That one thing is what I can pour my mindful intention into each day this year. It is something that will enrich and help to fulfill the other twelve things in my life that went up in flame, as it turns out. You see, I had turned into a Reel Master, doom scrolling down into the abyss of the rabbit hole. For someone who was more than content and happy giving up Facebook and Instagram for over a year before the COVID pandemic, things had slipped for far too long. I must confess here and now that I'm looking forward to a return to the healthy balance between lived experiences and new exposure to what the algorithm dictates before the world went utterly insane.

The other thing I wanted to do is pick one simple word to manifest this year. I wrote down three that were important to me and repeated the same process as I had with the specific thing I wanted to work on using the cleansing fire, symbolically providing the powerful energy and light of guidance for these new endeavors. These three words are more of a wide sweeping and broad stroke for the coming year. It has been about forty years or so that I've been daydreaming about what realizing this word would mean: Writing. So, this is the year to share my brand of fantasy with the wide world. Whether embraced and celebrated or rejected and ridiculed, it will be released for enjoyment and judgement, nonetheless.