Wait before you make any resolutions

Wait before you make any resolutions. If you don’t, your resolutions make may cost you time, vital energy, money, and hope about your ability to change.

The making of resolutions is a time-worn transition marking the beginning of a new year. Usually, we focus on our deficits, and then create a grocery list of needed changes. If we listen to advertisers, it almost literally turns into a shopping list. Who we are wasn’t good enough. So, voila, we’ve bought a laundry list of things or apps we’ve been told will help us feel better about ourselves.

I gave up on resolutions years ago. Building resolutions based on my failings always led to an even greater sense of failure. Why do that to myself? In case you think you’re better than me in this respect, studies suggest that resolution brain almost always leads to less confidence and more depression. Why do that to myself, I concluded?

Buddhism has a pointed metaphor about the suffering that attends our modern state of not enough, whether that’s about our insatiable need for more or our pursuit of feeling better about ourselves. Buddhist author Jack Kornfield speaks eloquently about the metaphor of Hungry Ghosts:

Wanting is characterized as a Hungry Ghost, a ghost with an enormous belly and tiny pinhole mouth, who can never eat enough to satisfy his endless need. When this demon or difficulty arises, simply name it as “wanting” or “grasping” and begin to study its power in your life.

Are we really helping ourselves by making our starting point our fixations, status, addictions, and/or our deficits? Aren’t there better starting options that don’t increase our suffering?

Tomorrow we’ll explore a different way of thinking about our resolutions. We’ll suggest that there’s a least one more better place to start than forging into two months of broken resolutions and the deepening self-judgement that comes with them.