A Resolution Revolution
We’re coming up on the time of year where I’d typically abandon yet another redundant New Year’s resolutions. Daily trips to the gym would become biweekly visits and the promise to quit biting my nails has been surely forgotten. This is not so much a time to find motivation, but to find your way to discipline.
Around Christmas, I wrote out my resolutions on a small, yellow sticky note, setting goals and expectations for myself for this upcoming new year. Some of the resolutions were made in the broader sense, like to publish more writing and to save money for a house. But other resolutions seemed much simpler and much less planning, or at least I hoped: Make more time for my friends, however that may be.
At this age, all of us now done with undergrad, moving into our adult worlds with a whole fresh set of problems, it’s been difficult for us all to see each other. We all have lives of our own now a little more separate from each other’s. Some of us full-time, some of us part-time. Some of us figuring it all out. Things are changing.
I had Alexa over the other evening for a night of coloring books, white wine and romantic comedies.
“No one else could join?” she asked as she walked in lugging a big duffle bag of magic markers and a stack of Coco Wyo coloring books.
“Just us tonight. Everyone is either at work, with a boyfriend or simply not within the state lines,” I replied, gesturing her to the big leather couch downstairs. It’s the same leather couch that’s seen all of our years of high school parties and middle school dramas. Just about everything about the basement is the same. The walls still painted a dark crimson red accompanied by old Disney pin lanyards hanging on display. The carpet holds a blue stain hostage in the corner-- one from a drunken night of Four Lokos almost ten years ago.
“Well, we can do this again once we’re all on a similar and more flexible schedule,” Alexa said as she began to unpack her tools.
“Will we though?” I questioned.
“What do you mean?”
Does it get easier? For a long time, I was under the impression that if the friendship lasts through college, it would simply last forever. I was under the impression that distance didn’t matter, that it would be easy to just pick up right where we left off. We didn’t have to talk every day to be friends. But I’m not sure how true that is anymore. How long do you hold onto a friendship before you realize, it may be time to actually set it free?
“Just give it a little more time, let’s see where this year takes us all,” Alexa said, and handed me a coloring book.
It seems like as we get older, the goals we make at the start of the year becomes more and more important. They become steppingstones, building blocks for the days that lie ahead. They become a map, one only we can read and one only we can achieve in the end. We make these goals at the start of every year with the hope we will somehow be a better version of ourselves 365 days later. The change that comes will be inevitable, but how you accept and handle that change is up to you.
We aren’t creatures of motivation; we are creatures of habit. Creatures of tradition. Habits can be formed by discipline, but also by accident. Every day we don’t take steps towards our resolutions, we are becoming more and more comfortable with the habit of not. We become used to the absence. Only then do we ask ourselves, is this where I want to be? Thankfully, it’s still early in the year. There’s plenty of time.