There is a sense of anticipation as one year ends and another one begins. People like new beginnings. A clean page, a new chapter, a different place to live… they all hold immense possibilities, which is what most of us seek at one point or other in our lives. So this yearly begin again is an opportunity to get it right. All those things that went a bit wonky in the past year, or for quite a few years, in some cases, now have a chance to be put right. All the twisted roads we took by mistake, where we got lost and sustained some damage… well, now we have a chance to find our way back to the main road and start making tracks in a real sense. It’s often at the end of a stage (and this stage can be the end of a year) that we reflect on what has gone before, and with the benefit of hindsight, begin to make some plans for improvements.

The end of one year and the beginning of the next is a place that has clear enough boundaries between old and new that we feel we can make lasting changes, or at least attempt to make them.

Sometimes we have been ready for such changes for a long time, but have been putting them off because we needed the right framing for our brave new thing. It doesn’t seem right to just drop old ways at any random time in the year. Psychologically, it seems as though the changes would be harder to enact, or to maintain. But somehow, that first day of the new year date seems to give our resolutions the legitimacy and the strength of commitment it needs to last longer beyond mere hours.

The months or weeks leading up to a new year are often spent in important thinking about the change and what it will mean for our life. That thinking phase is not time wasted, but a mental rehearsal of how we could be, and a validation of our strength of purpose. If we keep thinking it, and we keep stating our determination to stick to a particular goal, then this mental preparation will surely help us keep to the resolution.

One New Year’s Day twenty three years ago, I quit smoking. Just like that. Between one day and the next, I did not touch another cigarette again. But I had given up smoking and taken it up again two times prior to this. I had been smoking on and off since high school. And so the idea of wanting to quit was not one I hadn’t visited many times before that point. It was a case of trying again and again, and of reaffirming my commitment to this action enough times that in the end, I succeeded in convincing myself that I really wanted to do it. And I think that helped me to finally and conclusively pull it off. Between my first, unsuccessful attempt to give up smoking and my last, successful one, roughly eighteen years had gone by.

So it should not worry us if we make a New Year’s Resolution and then don’t stick to it. What’s worse is to want something badly enough to make a resolution and then to give up on it just because we didn’t succeed the first time.