My good friend and yoga instructor Jill in Seattle once announced to our yoga class that if anyone ever needed help sticking to a commitment, like a New Year's resolution, they should talk to me. I love any excuse to make resolutions because it's a good way to assess what my goals are and it's a good exercise in personal discipline.
I don't always stick to my commitments, as evidenced by my failed attempt to give up my compulsive web statistics checking. But I normally stick to about half of the resolutions I make.
This year, I made 5 New Years resolutions:
1. Make one new raw food recipe every week
2. Fast for at least 24 hours once per month
3. Travel to two new places this year
4. If SideCar (a small vegan grocery in Seattle) sells it, buy it there
5. Stop eating when I'm full
I've already completed #3 with a trip to Peru and a weekend road trip to South Carolina. I stuck to #4, even when it meant I didn't have toilet paper because SideCar was closed for the night, but had to give it up when I moved to Asheville. And I'll admit that I actually forgot entirely about #5 until just now, although I think I've naturally moved away from that bad habit over the last few months.
But the first two resolutions have opened my eyes to a new way of thinking. I made a conscious choice to give these up because they were no longer serving me.
I fasted once per month through September. Then October came and went, and I just didn't see the point. It's not that there is no benefit to fasting. It's just that deciding to not eat for 24 hours seemed arbitrary to me since I don't actually know much about how to fast. More importantly, I feel like I am doing a whole lot of amazing things for my health that I do know about and that I know are benefiting me. So I stopped fasting.
The weekly raw recipes have been a lot of fun. But as I get healthier, I find myself craving simpler foods. The fancy recipes stopped being fun at some point, and started to feel like a time-consuming burden. So that's it. No more weekly raw recipes unless I happen to feel like trying something new.
The purpose of my resolutions is to improve my life in some way. So if a resolution is holding me back, then out it goes. Hopefully, that will allow room for something new and useful.
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New years resolutions are made to be broken, so the whole thing is like a tradition. So my new years resolution was going to be to break all resolutions, but then I realised that I'd end up actually sticking to it unless I broke it which would still be sticking to it. So you should make a good resolution and make everyone think you mean it... then break it. Say if you promise never to eat chocolate, then buy like 10 boxes and eat them all at once. Wait... don't do that because then you might be sick. But you get what I mean dude.
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