Mid-February is the time when most New Year’s resolutions have dissolved. The gusto of the annual fresh start is dampened by the winter cold, and what was once considered a fresh start is now back to the same old grind. I’ve never understood why resolutions are made in the new year instead of with the coming of spring. With the hangover from the holidays, weather that keeps us bundled indoors, and the grumpiness of entire societies deprived of sunlight, the world seems literally against our aspirations to be our best selves.
I’m still hanging on by a thread. I still write here each morning wondering if it will be my final post before I get distracted by everything else in life for a few months. A course I invested in for improving my goal-setting has already been shoved into the corner of my “some other time” list. My vision of being conversational in ASL by the end of February is looking bleak.
But I don’t have to look at this all as failure, or me teetering on the edge of it. Regardless of whether I keep up my daily writing, as of today I have accrued about forty vignettes. Even if I haven’t been as studious with my coursework, the lessons I’ve picked up from it has given me a much healthier insight into the pace I’d like to move in life. And even if I’ll be fumbling with my fingers trying to speak sign language, I’ve become comfortable with the alphabet and about 200 words. Meanwhile, I have good reasons why I haven’t maintained my resolutions at the caliber that I had set for myself – I’m reading more, talking to mom more, and have avoided moving through life in a rush.
One of the books I’m reading is Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and it has helped make evident how extraordinarily fast we as a species have evolved. But this rapidness is still in the scope of deep time. It simply means that, compared to the movement of rocks and landmasses, the natural diaspora of flora and fauna, and the moods of the climate, humans have grown from apes picking at bone marrow to humans cognizant of ad-based algorithms very very quickly. But that doesn’t mean that who we are as individuals need to follow any of these paces. Maybe a sign of age is my comfort with allowing new technologies and cultural tropes to pass, to see vapidness as something that applies to us all if you zoom out far enough, and to be okay with all that. This perspective makes it okay, then, if I don’t hit every single one of my personal aspirations. I have my entire lifetime for that – an entire lifetime that’s nothing more than a brief moment in time.