HEALTH PLUS: So extensive are media suggestions for new year resolutions, it can be difficult to avoid the process
MAKING NEW year resolutions may prohibit us from savouring the present. They suggest that changes are required of us: that we are inadequate as we are. They imply that our life requires revision, our habits alteration; our bodies rejuvenation and our psyches intervention.
The practice of making new year resolutions says that decisions must be made for the future and they must be made now. It says that the new year is upon us and must not be wasted, that it is time to turn over new leaves, develop new lifestyles and generally alter the present, have ambitions for the future and specific goals for the year ahead.
So extensive are media suggestions for new year resolutions, that it is difficult to absent oneself from the process. After all, if others are entering new health routines, new nutritional regimes, new workout schedules and body image exercises, then we must too. The Christmas break is over. The new year is here. It is time to get up off the couch, solder the fridge door closed and make extensive lists of all that we intend to accomplish in the next 12 months. The party is over: the punishment must begin.
It is astonishing that those who just weeks ago were advising a merry Christmas, to chill out, eat well, enjoy a drink, relax and savour the Christmas break are now asserting that unless we snap up, shape up and get it together, then the future is lost.
We are asked to admit some sort of social culpability if we do not measure up to images of how perfect people should be. We are asked to engage in new physical programmes, psychological adjustments and social accommodations to improve ourselves. We are asked to timetable those changes. We are asked to change.
New year resolutions ask us to focus on the future. Like examinations of conscience, we are called upon to identify all those things that are negative in our lives and to eliminate them forthwith.
Lists are required: dos and don’ts are prescribed for the year ahead. Progress charts are devised to monitor our advancement on what we have resolved to do. Evaluative procedures are designed to determine if we have met our goals and implemented our plans in a measurable way.
While there is value in regular reappraisal of our lives, and no more obvious time for appraisal than annually at the end of each year, the question has to be asked, “What about the present? What about now? What about today?” What about savouring what we have and appreciating who we are, rather than imposing new arbitrary external aspirations on ourselves? Unless we have serious issues that we need to address, maybe the present is what matters most at this time.
This point is emphasised allegorically by Spencer Johnson’s The Precious Present which recounts the search by a child to solve an old man’s riddles and, in so doing, to find “the precious present” that will make him happy forever.
Predictably, he does not find it in toys, in travel, in wishes, in things, in places, in wealth or success. It is not until he gives up trying to find it that he discovers that “the precious present was just that, the present, not the past, not the future, but the precious present”.
Of course, the message that we should catch the day, gather rosebuds while we may, make hay while the sun shines and not worry about tomorrow is not new. But with the passage of time, with the end of each year and the beginning of a new one, perhaps this is the time to consider how we use our time, and if we are happy with how we do so.
The past is over. The future may or may not be. The present we have. It is ours. It is now. Now is the time to live it and appreciate ourselves as we are, instead of worrying about what other people think that we should be. The tyranny of time becomes more evident as time goes by. The passage of time cannot be defeated, but it can be defied by living our lives in ways that value them and value ourselves right now.
If we have learned anything this year, it must be how fickle the future can be, how quickly investments in that future may disappear and how not to invest in the future at the expense of now. Because the present cannot be taken away from us. It is indeed a gift worth resolving to enjoy.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is the director of the Student Counselling Services in UCD. She is author of many books, most recently
Living Our Times
published by Gill and Macmillan. Her new radio slot
Mindtime on Drivetime
is on Wednesdays on RTÉ Radio One