By Nathan Zaparilla (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: January 8, 2014
It’s January, the start of a new year, and certainly, a new you. You bought the dri-fit track suit and those funny-looking headphones with the clips on them. You’ve already demonstrated your emerging frugality by draining only half your savings on Boxing Day, and after finding it mixed with the Bakugan cards in the shoebox under your bed, you finally renewed your library card. This is going to be the year you become a better version of yourself — you can feel it.
Each year it’s the same story; a month of indulgence has left you bloated, hungover, and exhausted, but the thought of a new year and all its possibilities glimmers in your mind. You crawl out of the pitch-black cavern of a bedroom you quarantined yourself in on New Year’s Day, and expose yourself to the bright light of optimism that has infected the world around you. Nutritionists and financial planners are on the news sharing secret smoothie recipes and saving strategies, and gym memberships are selling like nicotine lozenges (hotcakes are loaded with saturated fats). Reinvention is the craze, and you willfully give in.
A cynic might ask, why bother? What inspires such false hope? Why does a new number on the calendar solicit these kinds of delusions of which one is capable?
Making New Year’s resolutions has become as big a holiday tradition as excessive drinking, and can leave you just as dejected and nauseated. But perhaps it is just that, the tradition and the comfort we take in it, that keeps us coming back. We try, we fail, and we pat ourselves on the back and go for a consolation Baconator. It’s nice, that feeling of familiarity, of normalcy — exactly what tradition is supposed to bring. So what if that familiarity is of failure?
And that is what the vast majority of resolutions will do. They will fail. Well, actually, we will fail, again and again, year after year until our hope runs out. But that’s the thing: our hope that we have the ability to better ourselves is infinite, since striving for self-improvement is simply part of our nature. Hope is not something that is earned by the hour, saved, traded, or sold. It lies within us, and though it may be lost, it is always found this time of year, illuminated by the neon lights of Time Square.
By February, my will might already be broken, my new running shoes barely scuffed, and the bottom of my backpack littered with loose papers and Snickers wrappers. I will have failed, along with a large percentage of my fellow resolute life-changers. But I won’t be ashamed, nor should any of us be, as there is no shame in failure, only in giving up. We tried, and that’s really all we can ask of ourselves, and really all we can ask from the world: just a little bit of genuine effort, the only thing that redeems humanity from the abominations of the Kardashians or Rebecca Black. Who knows, maybe your efforts will result in the success of your resolutions this year. Nonetheless, you can always take solace in the fact that you will never fail as miserably in 2014 as the Texas couple who named their kid So’Unique Miracle. Awful.
