Resolving to resolve

Resolving to resolve

Over the next week or so the mass media will be full of the now fashionable annual theme of the failed 'News Year's' resolution idea. A decade or so ago this was never considered to be so unfashionable an idea but gradually as the idea of acceptable failure has entered mainstream thinking it has become almost de rigueur to agonise over this now quaint idea that on the first of January one attempts vainly to transform one's usual pathetic life and emerge chrysalis like into a new sunlight as an freshly achieving person.

Equally there are people who actually believe that the world becomes a different place on the 1st of January and of course there is the horror opf knowing that by January the 31st it has all been and gone and it's head down and go for home Jerome.

Thus we now have the resolution not to give up the smoking thing for instance, or, of not to stop hitting on one's fellows for nutritional sexual gratification, or not to remain in the same boring dead end job, because our experience has demonstrated that once we resume our usual routines in the freshly paced frenzy of day to day living that we shall forget our resolve, so why bother.

Usually, in my view, the writers of 'failure' determined articles have failed to live up to his or her own resolve often enough in the past to relish the idea of popularising failure and the writer's editor is happy to accommodate 'resolve failure'; because without such failure the magazine/ newspaper/ radio programme et al would lose its appeal. After all the whole idea of being part of the mass is to remain predictable and therefore part of the market; and the idea of 'market failure' is currently a fashionable one. One could say therefore that the sub-texts are suspect.

However the cool thing about the Bloggist's world is that this idea of Failure resolve is irrelevant. By the nature of things our Blog world is one of individual commitment, performance and achievement in this, the great citizen's fight back against editorial gatekeeper controlled voicelessness. This applies irrespective of what it is we are all writing about.

For this particular Bloggist the week between Christmas and New Year is a time of renewal, for assessing the impact of goals set for the preceding year and renewing the commitment to building oneself into a more effective human. Of course it's also a time for boozing and gorging gluttonously, gourmandishly on heaps of lubricious foods and hanging out in the Jacuzzi.

The upside of aging is that I have also come to accept that you win some and you lose some; and that achieving transformation in one's own life is a continuous process that begins with birth and ends with death. New Years day is for me a moment for re-affirming my own sense of purpose, without which, in my view, life is inherently pointless: irrespective of all the marketing hype to the contrary..

So for this bloggist a big part of achieving one's goals in the New Year is summed up in the phrase 'Resolving to resolve'. Perhaps the best way to think of this is like the piece of string you may tie about your finger to remember that you have to remember something. Of course, remembering what it is we have to remember is critical to 'resolution' success. In the other words the only way to live a purpose driven life is to keep track of and remember the purpose through all the digressions and relapses and general ups and downs of everyday life, because as the late John Lennon famously observed life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.


That is the real difficulty, I've found, when we reach January 31st. Then is when the reality of the goal we set in the heady holiday mod of Jan 1 has degenerated glutinously into a treacle tar of anxiety. BY March 312 it is history and we're the rats in the pack.


Then in addition to remembering to remember, there is a truth, in my view, that there are resolutions that work and there are those that don't; and the difference between the two seems always dependent on the words we used to describe what we were going to do as our purpose.

They [our resolves] are also subject to the rule of 'moreless' so our goal should be 'lessmore'.

Fourthly humans are 'hard wired' against negativity. Negativity is not the same as as creative appraisal to which it is related but which nonetheless is not the goal.

The resolution that I eventually came to grips with and effectively implemented after decades of rationalised procrastination on the 11th of September 1995 at O7.30 hours, was simply: Write 100 words every day.

I regularly said that I would stop smoking and failed as regularly not realising that I had framed my actions as a ngative action linked to a future intention. The future is an illusion and so was my resolve.

I stopped smoking by accident when the opportunity inadvertently arose as a side effect of taking a nine millimetre bullet through the liver one particularly bad day here in Jozi. The slug hit me from behind and as it exited via my liver red the shock wave blew out the lower lobe on the right lung. During weeks in intensive care sucking oxygen through a mask I implemented a decades old and regularly failed anti-smoking resolution by deciding: to smoke zero cigarettes daily for life.

In two thousand-the Millennium Gap year when we didn't know if we were in one century or the next I made a resolution: to write a poem every day. I never imposed any judgements on my daily poems and the only rule I made was that were I to write more than one in any day that did not absolve me from writing one the next day.

It took about six weeks to write anything for which I have any regard, in retrospect, and I ended the year with 826 poems [most of which were incoherent garbage]. It wasn't part of my goal to judge what I wrote; that can always come later like last year when an opportunity arose to compile an anthology now published on my personal website.

So I discovered and affirmed that small, easily manageable targets practiced daily build up over inevitable time to considerable output.

Over the Christmas Period my aging mother chanced upon a printed copy of the collection [called Rehearsing Nietzsche] and randomly opened it with Murphy like accuracy to the one poem in the collection with which she could identify [since it was a conversation with her that had prompted the poem] At first she was enchanted and then later with the rage of age and militant motherhood she became angry and domineering and wanted words changed which I naturally declined to do. To paraphrase some prison graffiti: if you are doing this to please your mother you are fucked.

One of last year's favourite moments was finding an old book in a storeroom in which I had written my 'Ten Resolves and purposes for 1982' and although there is no indication that I had ever seen the book again since the day I wrote the stuff down I realised with joy that I had achieved nine of them. That indicated that once a goal is written down it becomes more powerful.

As to this year? I shall continue with the resolves from last year with some additions. Each of ten resolves will be defined positively in terms of a small daily contribution to the end of the year account each resolve involving no more than 7 words, preferably fewer, and based on present time.

So my approach now will be to write the ten short seven word max sentences that will help me to become a more effective person over the next twelve months and to remember to remember, I shall sprinkle them randomly through my diary. Should I be ahead on points when I encounter them through the course of 2006 then I shall have something to be cheerful about, and should I be behind then I shall be cheered at the thought that I would now have an opportunity to move ahead and retake control of my life.

Practise cheerfulness daily in 2006
Keep on Blogging
Love you all
NiK