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Health & Fitness

Resolving To Say "No" To Resolutions

New Year's Resolutions and I do not work out too well. So this year I am going to do something a little bit different: I am just not going to make New Year's Resolutions.

It is probably a little too early to be thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, but after stumbling across my resolutions from last year, it has been on my mind. Every single year for the past several, if not longer, I have made at least one resolution that I swore I would follow through on for the duration of the incoming year. 

Sometimes I would have a lengthy list that I would forget just as quickly as I made it, and sometimes I would have a small list of one or two things that eventually went the way of the Dodo. No matter how many made it onto the list, these resolutions usually fell into the realm of stupid, impractical and next to impossible to attain even if I did keep up with them. A rare few even when beyond that and straight into “How did you even come up with that?” territory. 

Even the most well intended, somewhat productive, seemingly easy to do resolutions fell by the wayside eventually. That whole “I am going to cook one full meal a week straight from a cookbook!” is one of those that sounds really easy (not to mention delicious!) to do. Let me tell you something here: It is not easy, as it turns out. It is actually kind of time consuming. Do you have any idea how long it takes to read through multiple cookbooks? 

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I also said I was going to read the books I already own and never really touched except to occasionally gaze at the back cover and consider reading. I had the best intentions, I really did, but then I got distracted by newer and shinier books. 

At some point late last year I must have decided I was in desperate need of a camera, because “Buy a camera” also made the list. Honestly, not one person who knows me should be even a little surprised this one did not work out. I haven’t actually owned a camera, except for the ones on my phone and ipod, since I was twelve or so. 

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As you can see, New Year’s Resolutions and I just do not work out too well. So this year I am going to do things a little bit differently. I am just going to skip the entire process of thinking up and attempting to follow through on any resolution whatsoever. They never stick, no matter how serious or how stupid they are so why waste the time to begin with? 

From what I have seen, the resolutions people usually declare tend to be focused on what they deem to be the bad things, things that must be improved or else. Concentrating all of your energy on what you think is so terrible, even when it is not that bad, cannot be that healthy. Instead of vowing to finally (FINALLY!) fix that one unbelievably horrid thing about yourself, which is probably not actually that bad anyway, shifting your energy to the positive probably would do loads more for your self-esteem, self-worth, whatever. I’m no psychologist but it sounds like pretty good logic to me. 

So instead of wasting my time creating another list of useless goals that I am going to ignore after about a week, I am just going to keep on keeping on. I mean, I am already working on getting the things I really want in my life as it is. There is not much point in writing them down and declaring them to be New Year’s Resolutions. Doing so is not going to make me work three thousand times harder for them, except maybe in the first few days of 2012 just so I can say my resolutions are not failing. 

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