Christensen: Stop taking resolutions so seriously

The day after Christmas, I was sitting on the couch in one of my oldest friends’ living rooms,… The day after Christmas, I was sitting on the couch in one of my oldest friends’ living rooms, watching a TV special about sandwiches.

“I can’t believe how fast it’s going,” my friend said suddenly as, on screen, a bun was piled with eggs and bacon.

“How fast what’s going?” I asked.

“I mean … our lives,” she said, and, as though on cue, the cuckoo clock behind us indicated afternoon. There we were, a few days before 2011. My friend and I are only a handful of years older than we were when we first met, but a lot of things are different now. At least with her. I can’t tell whether I’ve changed that much, but to her it probably seems as though I have.

As I drove away from my friend’s house later that day, I got to thinking about the upcoming new year, new semester and the possibility of a new start. Again. Just like I had back in September. Just like I had the year before, and the year before that.

What’s in a new year after all? We make resolutions and break them. We buy a gym membership, but realize that we’d rather sit on our couches than climb a specific number of steps in a room with a bunch of other sweating human beings. We resolve to quit smoking, but pick up a pack because the pleasure of having a 10-minute smoke break all to ourselves outweighs the fears of death and gum decay.

How are we supposed to change or move on when the past is always nipping at our heels? Particularly in January, the month named for the two-headed god of beginnings and endings; one visage turned to the future, the other to the past.

See, I consider myself the queen of resolution. It doesn’t take a calendar date for me to want to change. Almost weekly I resolve to stop spending money wastefully, get a job, have more … constructive weekends. Stop seeing that one guy. Study my French. Shape up my act, or whatever.

It never really works out, or at least everything takes much longer than I anticipate. Maybe what is wrong is that we’re looking for a sudden change — or more like a sudden improvement. We forget that even if the change does happen, we probably won’t be much happier. And if we are happier, the change will be incremental.

The human condition is pretty much one of equilibrium. Our happiness might momentarily increase when we get a promotion or do well on our exams, but after a little while, maybe only a day, it’s going to balance out to where we were before. Hopefully that’s a state of contentment, but judging from the number of Americans who want to change something in their lives each year — about 100 million, according to CNN — we have a hard time being satisfied with ourselves just the way we are.

So maybe this year, we should resolve to stop striving so hard for the next thing in our pursuit of happiness. Maybe we should resolve to stop trying to improve ourselves so much and be content with what we are. It’s like this David Foster Wallace quote I read in his biography “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself”:

“If you can think of times in your life that you’ve treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it’s probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we’re here for is to learn how to do it. I know that sounds a little pious.”

It sounds a little pious, I think, because we’ve been trained to think that loving yourself is an act of selfishness or vanity. But maybe the first step to self-improvement is learning how to treat yourself with “extraordinary decency” — and sometimes that decency involves stopping something that harms you, or walking away from a situation that doesn’t make you happy. Or maybe it involves learning to accept that you have flaws and vices, and you enjoy them, and you don’t necessarily want to change them, despite popular belief that you should.

Either way, I think the new year needs to stop having this bionic man connotation — that each January we can improve ourselves drastically, make ourselves better, faster, stronger, more pure human beings. It’s stupid. It’s a concept that leads only to disappointment.

So this new year, I’m resolving to stop trying to change so much. Because change comes anyway, whether or not you’re working toward it, whether or not it’s good. I mean, you’ve seen it already. You graduate from high school, and one year you come back home and you see your best friend. You sit on her couch, right where you always sat, when she made you watch “Spice World” and when you lamented about how your marching band uniforms — shut up — made you look chunky. Except now your friend is talking about getting married to the guy she’s been living with for the past few months, and gas prices, and her job. You weren’t there for the big change. It happened while you were away. Besides, it wasn’t tangible. You didn’t see it until it was sitting there talking to you.