Reset …Day One

“The best laid plans of mice and men often go away”

So many of us mark this day with a list of objectives we somehow believe will improve our life experience.

Almost invaribaly we begin our new commitment one by delaying it a day…”until the hangover passes” or maybe two, explaining to ourselves -“just til I get back into the routine“, forgetting that the ” routine” we hope to get back into is the one we hope our resolutions will take us out of.

Other saboteurs of our will, may acutally find residence in our our neual divergence from the polished laquered norm we see in mainstream and social media.

For example those of us with ADHD may find day one in our newly chosen practice never actually comes because of the kaleidoscope of butterflies that draw our attention to other experiennces ….who knew a group of butterflies was actually called a kaleidoscope? I mean it makes sense right? What with all the colors…who comes up with these descriptions of gathering of animals? I mean a group of crows is a Murder! What is that about?…

Dammit! I digress …

Where was I ?

My line of thought was something like… we all aspire toward the favorable upward trending of our existence and we know that no one is going to live for us, so we devise lists of resolutions to attempt to facilitate the conditions that whatever we want more of will be drawn to us.

We target bodywork to improve our self image and health, we target unhealthy habits like daily drinking or smoking to have a more authentic life- or at least one in which we remember what we did last night. We pick up yoga or meditation to mute the static between our ears, we sign up to Audible to expose ourselves to the wealth of the written word, we commit to drinking more water, walking up the stairs instead of the elevator, visiting our mother more often, reducing our tardiness and so on all to tweak the existence of the life we are living.

So why do so many resolutions never make it into our daily practice?

Life coaches, and self help books try to fill the gap where our willpower falls short but all too often the power of old habits shelves the book before complete and finds flaw with the advice of the coach. I suspect this to be because the pain of our currrent habit has not been leveraged to the extent that it is more than just a fanciful wish. Something we thing might look good on us rather than something we can not live without.

And this is why the choice of an arbitrary day that follows the biggest night of partying in the year, may not actually be the most effective approach to achieving our dreams.

So what is?

I don’t really know…

I gave up making resolutions a while ago.

Yet that doesn’t mean my existence hasn’t evovled tremendously since.

It just means my perspective has.

The clarity surrounding the notion that the long term is made of a series of short terms is practice that has heretofore escaped me

More on that later…. assuming another kaleidoscope doesnt fly by and this practice sticks past day one 😉

For now let me simply say there are three hundred and sixty five and a quarter opportunities to see what will and I am looking forward to the walk through 2023, may yours be thrilling too.