All things are possible on Jan. 1

Jan. 1 is the tomorrow we avoid all year, as in ‘I’ll start my diet tomorrow’ and ‘I’ll think about finding a job tomorrow.’ On the week of Jan. 1, the jig is up.

Which is a good thing. If it were not for Jan. 1, we’d have to rely on our own good character to break bad habits and start good ones.

The architects of the modern calendar seemed to understand that relying on ourselves was not a workable plan. They seemed to know that initiative and will power were not as abundant in the human soul as, say, the powers of rationalization that let you purchase a Dunkin’ Donuts ‘family pack’ to brighten the morning of your officemates and, OK, since the box is right there by your desk, you might just treat yourself to a cruller or three.

So they made sure there were, at reasonable intervals, endings and beginnings — the end of one year, the beginning of another. And they scheduled the end and the beginning at exactly the right time. The creators of the calendar anticipated that, in the days after Christmas, we would look up from pushing the last broken fragments of cookies into our mouths, brush the crumbs from our shirts, take stock of our hung-over, hefty selves and need, as desperately as we have ever needed anything, to declare a do-over.

The great gift of Jan. 1 is that it doesn’t matter how piggy and slothful and irresponsible we have been the previous 365 days, how many Oreos, Frappuccinos, double-stuffed pizzas or martinis we have consumed, or how many trips to the gym gave way instead to naps. We shove all that behind us (and what a behind it has become) and, with just the turn of the calendar from Dec. 31 to Jan. 1, we get to turn the page on ourselves, too. We get to believe that the character flaws that have delivered us to this same sorry state every year can be piled at the curb and carted away with the empty Champagne bottles.

Some need the do-overs this year more than others. If the runaway bride had it all to do over again, she might have chosen to, I don’t know, have a discussion with her fiance before staging a ’24’-style kidnapping.

Tom Cruise might wish he hadn’t been so — what’s the word? — brainless (but kind of funny in a creepy way) in holding forth with the ‘Today’ show’s Matt Lauer on the history of psychiatry. Lauer handled the interview with the patience of a white-coated attendant handing out meds. But his own do-over might be that he would have asked how Cruise managed to fit medical school in between making ‘Mission Impossible’ movies and kissing Katie Holmes for photographers.

Somebody in the White House might have wished they had known George Bush was actually serious when, during the search for a Supreme Court nominee, he said that of all the judges and lawyers and really smart people in the United States, the best choice was the head of the search committee itself, his own good friend Harriet Miers.

As for myself, I wish I had made more frequent visits to the gym I joined in September and to which I continue to pay monthly dues. I figure it’s cost me about $20 per minute on the elliptical machine. But that was 2005. The coming year will be different. This will be the One, the life-changing year. I will learn to love root vegetables and mixed greens. I will set People aside until I have read the New Yorker. I will do curls and crunches. I will find out what’s in my garage. I will plant.

This year, I’m going to get it right. I can wipe the slate clean and start over. Near Year’s (and the days following) is the tomorrow I can no longer postpone or avoid. And so as I sit here writing these hopeful words, I am thinking what surely all of us were during the last few days before the new year: It is not tomorrow yet.

Joan Ryan is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle. Send comments to her in care of thi newspaper or send her e-mail at [email protected].