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I just read a Facebook post from a mommy blogger about how she's too tired to make new year's resolutions this year. Usually, she, along with all the other inspirational bloggers (mommy or other), has a big list of intentions, goals, and aspirations for the coming year: run a marathon, double her side hustle, cook mini-quiches for her kid's entire class, make her child's birthday party into a week-long festival, be happy always, be a sexy wife, release a single with Drake, and on and on and onnnnnnnnn. She's done with it. She's tired. She's not setting goals this year.
This reminded me of a post I did a while back about the dark side of all this self-improvement: a possible core belief that we are basically flawed and need to fix ourselves.
So here is my encouragement for the second week of January: don't worry about it all that much. If you haven't made a vision board and set a bunch of smart goals for the year to make yourself a better person, don't let it stress you out.
If you have, you can also not let it stress you out. This doesn't necessarily mean throwing your carefully-crafted goals out the window, nor does it mean settling in for a year of sloth because nothing matters. It just means that we can live our lives without constantly trying to maximize them.
Here's the thing with New Year's resolutions in the age of inspirational bloggers: there is a difference between having a pinch point in your life where something just has to change and some kind of never-ending attempt to "live your best life" 100% of the time (this is genuinely impossible). Maybe you are truly not making enough money to get by, your job is making you feel like trash, you have a project that is just bursting to get out of you, or a bad habit that you are just sick of. By all means, go! Do it! Make the change!
But if your life isn't broken, it may not need to be fixed. And if YOU are not broken (which you almost certainly aren't, you magical human creature, you!), then you don't need to be fixed either. Maybe just set an intention to actually listen to what your little heart and spirit are telling you more often and see what happens?
(Oh, except for the ONE thing that is definitely broken in all of our lives and society and the world and that is our relationship to the PLANET and the ENVIRONMENT and how we treat the EARTH. Let's all resolve right now to be better stewards of our home and hold ourselves to this resolution as if our species' existence depends on it! Kaythanksbyeeeeee.)
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I enjoyed this post, and the older post you linked to. I needed to read something like this! I am a huge believer in self improvement, and always have a daunting list of goals I am pushing myself to achieve. I think I have a twisted sense of pride, feeling like I am not only aware of, but actively working on, my "flaws". But it's exhausting. And I question how much I am actually accomplishing and what exactly I am racing towards, whom I am competing with, and why. I could probably stand to be much more mindful about what I focus on. There are certainly some things that are genuinely worth working on, but others that I can likely toss aside. I ironically waste more time and energy worrying about wasting my time and energy. Maybe instead of continually feeling like I need to make yet another list, and feeling like crap when I haven't checked enough off, I could chill a little bit, and stop beating myself up all the time (sounds like another resolution - ha!).
ReplyDeleteOne year my resolution was to chill out. It's still technically a resolution, but it was a nice thing to remind myself of throughout the year. :)
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