Q: New Year’s Day has come and gone this year and once again my wife and I have managed to betray all of those resolutions we made. We have good intentions but we never follow through on them. Do these resolutions serve any useful purpose or are they just a ploy that gets us feeling badly about ourselves?
A: Given that the tradition of the New Year’s resolution has been around for almost 2,000 years, it probably has some merit. The Roman god of choice was Janus, a strange creature who had the ability to look at both future and past events simultaneously. He could identify past grievances while planning for a future that might be more rewarding.
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The Romans liked this idea and used it to celebrate their new year. They exchanged gifts of good fortunes, preparing each other for their new year while settling whatever disputes they had from past years. Along the way, this process changed and New Year’s Eve became an opportunity to plan for better things in the future.
Resolutions help assess where you are in relation to personal goals and perhaps change or modify them into more realistic opportunities.
Carl Jung, a psychologist in the 20th century, argued that everyone, regardless of age, needs life goals. Younger people need goals that are more concrete and objective like building homes, working on their careers and raising families. Older people need more spiritual goals to help them prepare for life after death. New Year’s is an opportunity to reflect on those goals.
The problem that you and your wife have is that you tend to identify targets before you have clearly identified the goals you want to pursue in the first place. You want to quit smoking, lose a few pounds and spend more time with your wife without really knowing why.
You are not likely to quit smoking because a television commercial tells you that you would be healthier without the cigarette. You stand a much better chance of quitting if you want more intimacy in your life and if your craving a cigarette gets in the way of spending quality time with your wife.
The framework for life goals is simple. It is to better appreciate the day, feeling satisfied by what is happening and sharing yourself with other people. The good feeling you have when you are harvesting a great crop only comes after working hard to plant and nurture seeds.
Before you and your wife start to burden yourselves with a bunch of resolutions, check out your life goals and what it is going to take for the two of you to enjoy the moment.
Accomplishing goals then becomes much easier.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan. Contact: jandrews@producer.com.
