No Resolutions … no comments
I’ve been thinking about traditional New Year’s Resolutions for a couple of days now. I suppose I should stop thinking about them because the tradition is to make them on New Year’s Day. And it’s already the third.
In my life I have made many New Year’s Resolutions, usually based on what I thought a good resolution should be – this year (whatever year it was) I will lose weight, be nice, go to church, stop eating junk food, find a nice boyfriend … all things that the people around me wanted me to do and all things that I ultimately failed at. I pretty much stopped doing this after I moved twenty-five hundred miles away from my family. My resolutions fell by the wayside.
Two years ago I decided to do something new. On New Year’s Day of that year I took a personal vow to live that year as the last year of my life. To truly contemplate what I would like my last year on the planet in this form to be. To contemplate my death and know that I lived life to its fullest. To go out at the end of the year with no regrets, no attachments. I made a conscious decision to not do things that were against my nature. I looked at this as a project and went into it thinking that I should live my life consciously without social restrictions and that I should use only my own spirit as a guide.
That year was one of the two happiest years of my life. It wasn’t without its ups and downs and all-arounds. But everything that I did, no matter how small was something that I consciously chose to do. Every action came with the question of how it fit into my big scheme, how would I feel when I looked back on it at the end of the year.
It was probably my first successful New Year’s Resolution.
Main Entry: res·o·lu·tion 
Pronunciation: "re-z&-'lü-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English resolucioun, from Anglo-French or Latin; Anglo-French resolucion, from Latin resolution-, resolutio, from resolvere
1 : the act or process of resolving : as a : the act of analyzing a complex notion into simpler ones b : the act of answering : SOLVING c : the act of determining d : the passing of a voice part from a dissonant to a consonant tone or the progression of a chord from dissonance to consonance e : the separating of a chemical compound or mixture into its constituents f (1) : the division of a prosodic element into its component parts (2) : the substitution in Greek or Latin prosody of two short syllables for a long syllable g : the analysis of a vector into two or more vectors of which it is the sum
2 : the subsidence of a pathological state (as inflammation)
3 a : something that is resolved resolution to mend my ways> b : firmness of resolve
4 : a formal expression of opinion, will, or intent voted by an official body or assembled group
5 : the point in a literary work at which the chief dramatic complication is worked out
6 a : the process or capability of making distinguishable the individual parts of an object, closely adjacent optical images, or sources of light b : a measure of the sharpness of an image or of the fineness with which a device (as a video display, printer, or scanner) can produce or record such an image usually expressed as the total number or density of pixels in the image resolution of 1200 dots per inch>
synonym see COURAGE
Definition from Merriam-Webster (I particularly like numbers two and six, but all of these definitions taken individually and without relationship to each other seem to expand the definition of what we think of when we say ‘New Year’s Resolution)