New Year’s Resolutions

Oddly, this year, I haven’t heard anyone talking about New Year’s resolutions very much. I certainly haven’t talked about them.

There’s nothing wrong, per se, with wanting to change or with wanting to do better. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to give up a bad habit, or modify one’s lifestyle; we could probably all use a little more moderation in our lives, except for those of us who could use a little more liberation, of course.

New Year’s resolutions seem so alien to me, though. 

Take dieting for example: In the depths of the winter, in the coldest, darkest, most miserable time of the year, when all the fun has been had, and there’s nothing much to look forward to, except for more cold, more darkness and a lot more wet, before the spring finally shows up some time around May, should we really expect so much of ourselves? Should we really expect to forego, to give up the things that actually keep us going through the most miserable season of the year.

There is a reason that lettuce grows in the summer and turnips grow in the winter. There are vastly more sugars and starches and calories in a turnip, and you can, in fact you’d be advised to, eat it, steaming hot! The land around us is what nature provides to feed us, so why would we shun it and diet during the season that provides us with higher calorie foods. There is a reason that there is limited daylight in the winter. If we just slept through the hours of natural darkness, we’d go into the sort of natural semi-hibernation that would preserve our physical resources through the coldest weather, so why on Earth do so many of us join gyms in January?

It just isn’t natural!

Modern living tells us that we can have what we want and do what we want, when we want, so we eat lettuce and lemons at Christmas, and the length of our working day never alters. We wear t-shirts inside in January in our over-heated houses and then wonder why we feel the cold outside, and why we fall prey to every cold and flu and stomach bug going around. We don’t listen to the World or our bodies, and then we wonder why they stop working, and we try to make up for it with a New Year’s resolution. 

I don’t think it’s going to be enough, somehow, do you?