New Year's vs. New Year's Resolutions.

 "Oh, you are going to exercise and eat right?  I'll remind you of that at the Superbowl party, right when you are eating all of the cheese dip."

I hate New Year's but I love New Year's resolutions.

Maybe hate is too strong of a word.  I've just found that the amount of effort and time that I put into planning a New Year's celebration is inverse to the amount of fun that I have.  The effort never lives up to the hype.  This year I didn't know what I was doing until the day before.  I ended up having a great time hanging out with my cousin and her family.  No pressure, no you-must-have-fun-or-you-wasted-your-money mentality, no navigated crowds or too drunk strangers.

In the grand experiment of my life, I've had to grudgingly come to the conclusion that at least with a New Year's Eve celebration, you can't plan fun.  And that, my friend, is heresy.

I'm a planner.  I've become more of one as I've gotten older, partly from necessity but also after learning the perverse joy that I get from checking things off a list.  And that's why I love New Year's resolutions.

It's such a great premise, this promise of change.  Who cares that most people last an average of nine days before quitting?  There are fantastic videos on YouTube that tell us otherwise, where we get to see satisfying montages of before and after set to inspiration music!  Let's go by some kale and get a gym membership!


I could list about 50 things that I'd like to change about myself without breaking a sweat.  But that just leads to a laundry list of resolutions, one that I feel vaguely guilty about by March and pretend I never made by May.

And yet...people do change.  I'm not the same person that I was ten years ago (let's not discuss my fashion decisions) and I will not be the same person in ten years.  So how do I shape this change if resolutions don't work?

I have an idea.  Instead of making resolutions, I'm going to work on one habit, once per month.  These are the rules that I set for myself:

• I will commit to doing one habit once a day, every day for a month. 
• Each habit will help my body, mind, or spirit.
• Each good habit must be challenging but doable.
• It's not cumulative i.e. I won't have 12 great habits by December that I do every single day.  The month long experiment is supposed to give me an idea of whether or not it's worth doing.
• I'm going to blog about it.  Is blogging still a thing?  I think all of the cool kids on are Tumblr now

Enjoy.