Saints and Sinners: Resolutions are quick to fade
What happened to all those fine New Year’s resolutions we made only a few weeks ago? Actually, New Year’s resolutions aren’t a big thing with most of us these days. Few of us even bother to make them. The rest of us break them after a few days.
One survey revealed that only two out of 100 people made serious resolutions for 2005. The other 98 will presumably just bow to destiny.
That’s too bad. Our New Year’s resolutions are the goals we set for ourselves in the coming year, and psychologists have discovered a direct relationship between the goals we set and the success we achieve.
It’s the person who isn’t shooting for any bull’s eye who fails to get ahead. A New Year’s resolution gives you a target. With 365 arrows in your quiver, you are bound to hit your mark — if you remember two things.
The first rule is: don’t make any puny resolutions. Some of us set our goals so low that we never have to risk the chance that they will be unmet.
The second rule is: you’ve got to mean business with your resolutions. Take them seriously. Give them the “30-day test,” at least. If you oversleep two mornings in a row after resolving to jump out of bed at 6 a.m., set the alarm for 6 a.m. again the next day.
The hardest part about New Year’s resolutions isn’t trying to keep them; it’s making them. Few of us are honest enough with ourselves or know ourselves well enough to put our finger on what’s holding us back.
If you can’t think of anything that is standing between you and greater happiness, ask your significant other. Have her (or him) make your New Year’s resolution for you by picking out the one thing about you that she (or he) would like to change. Then you keep the resolution.
Every wife has something she would like her husband to give up. Or there is something he doesn’t do that she would like him to do. The husband has the same wishes about his wife.
We would all be positively amazed to see how much more smoothly our relationships would run if each party would agree to do just one thing the other desired. Just one thing. Such an arrangement might very well have saved the marriage of the woman in New York who recently got a divorce on the grounds her husband preferred whiskey to her.
“I told him one night, judge,” said the wife, “that he would have to choose between liquor and me. I scarcely had the words out of my mouth when he dashed to the phone, called the liquor store and told them to send a bottle right over.”
A story with a happier ending concerns a young woman who was worried because her fiance was always late — not only for dates, but also for appointments. He would show up late for job interviews and business luncheons. Promises meant nothing.
One Christmas she gave him a wooden plaque etched with the famous quotation, “I owe all of my success in life to having always been a quarter of an hour beforehand.”
He took the hint and made promptness his goal in life. It not only saved his relationship, it turned his life around.
Frances Hayward, an octogenarian in my parish in Boston, had a rule of thumb we would all be wise to follow. “If you can’t begin at the beginning,” she said, “begin in the middle.”
In other words, she would say to us today, “it’s not too late to make your New Year’s resolution even though January first is long past.”
George Plagenz is an ordained minister and veteran newsman based in Columbus, Ohio.