5, 4, 3, 2, 1… Happy New Year!
Ah… the start of a new year. You know what that means… time for New Year’s resolutions. In case you live under a rock and somehow don’t know what New Year’s resolutions are, I’m going to explain them to you. A “New Year’s resolution” is when everyone collectively makes a list of goals they want to achieve in the upcoming year. These goals include better habits, getting a job, going to the gym, etc. That means that everyone is buying new “self-help” books, getting gym memberships, applying to new jobs, cleaning out their homes, and anything else you could think of. I know, I know, I’m sitting here talking about New Year’s resolutions as if they’re terrible, but they’re not. It’s great to have goals for yourself and to want to become better. Heck, I have a few resolutions of my own.
In the new year, I’ve set goals for myself to go to the gym more frequently and achieve the “perfect bod,” along with reading more, and spending more time with friends and family. These are some of the most basic New Year’s resolutions there are in the existence of New Year resolutions. Which means almost everyone and their mother have the same ones.
As I have been attempting to pursue with my goals, so has everyone else. All throughout January and this first half of February, the gym has been absolutely packed. I’ve been going to the same gym for a little less than a year, and I’ve never spent so much time waiting for a barbell. It’s been so bad sometimes that three of the ten squat racks and one of the benches at the gym have been missing barbells. Never in my life did I think that I would have to sit at a squat rack, waiting for someone else to be done doing whatever they were doing so I could finally use it. Not only have I been spending forever waiting on machines, but when I am trying to do an exercise, I pretty much have no room to breathe. There are SO MANY people at the gym it is actually insane.
It’s been about a month and a half, how has the progress been going? Well, let me tell you, I pretty much stopped going altogether by the end of January. Now, I probably go about once a week, if I’m lucky. But, the few times that I’ve gone recently, it’s been SO empty. It’s crazy. It’s almost like everyone collectively decided to cancel their gym memberships after not even a month of trying to get that “dream bod”. Anyway, that might be my call to go back to the gym. Or, there’s always next year…
Moving on from the gym, another one of my goals has been to read more, specifically in a book category called “Self-help.” So, on January 1, I made my way over to my local Barnes & Noble, just to find that the entire self-help section was wiped clean. I mean, there was maybe one book on the entire row of shelves. I guess everyone’s trying to figure out a way to be better humans. Which is good, I guess, but now I can’t become better. How in the world am I possibly supposed to figure out how to improve without the help of books like “Atomic Habits” by James Clear or “The Alchemist” by Paolo Coelho, or any of the hundreds of other self-help books in the world? Well, there’s always next year to become better, I guess.
Other than resolutions for my private self, such as the gym and reading, I’ve got some more “public” ones, such as spending more time with the people I care about. I think this must be such a common resolution, because all of a sudden, all my friends have been asking to hang out. I swear, I’ve got friends I haven’t seen outside of school for months, maybe even years, but now, out of nowhere, they want to hang out again. The same goes for my family. Now we are starting family game nights and movie nights? Since when did any of us say we wanted to do that? Either way, it’s okay, I like spending time with the people I love. Until I don’t. For the entirety of January, I spent SO MUCH time with them, that now I can’t even stand to hear their voices anymore. So, I guess that resolution also fell through. Oh well… there’s always next year.
It’s now the middle of February, and I haven’t changed one bit. But I can bet that every single one of you also hasn’t. Because, let’s be honest, every year we make resolutions for the new year and they always fall through. We find excuses to stop doing them. Whether it’s that you don’t have hours to spend at a packed gym, you tried to start reading but can’t find anything good, or whatever other excuse we come up with. Then, we end the excuse with the phrase “There’s always next year.” Unfortunately, that phrase is setting us up for failure. Every. Single. Year. So, instead of making up a million and one excuses as to why we can’t achieve our goals for the year, let’s find a million and one reasons why we should continue to try to be better.
Also, we shouldn’t be waiting until January to start better habits and to grow. No matter what is going on in life, there’s always a way to improve, whether it’s a new year, new month, new week, new whatever, or even old whatever. Instead of holding yourself back with the idea that you can only start new habits at the beginning of the year, start new habits at the beginning of each day. Because when you start to do that, you will finally see some true progress. Unless… well… you don’t have the time for it, then… “there’s always tomorrow”…
