By Rev. Cherie A. Booker, M.Div. Pastoral Counselor
Founder: Caribbean Community Pastoral Counseling Centers

As 2011 dawns, there is no doubt that many persons have determined that their lives would be enhanced if they made certain attitudinal and or behavioral changes in the New Year.  Most of us find ourselves making promises like, “In the New Year I will stop drinking, or lose weight, or begin an exercise program, or open a savings account, or start going to church again, etc”. You name it and it’s almost guaranteed that someone has resolved to do it in the New Year. It is almost a cultural expectation to make New Year’s resolutions. There are even websites dedicated to helping us make and keep our new decisions.

While the tradition of making annual resolutions may appeal to our desire to ‘better’ ourselves, and the custom is capable of providing some impetus for getting us started on the road to change, it is not enough to ensure that we sustain these changes and achieve our desired outcome, a better self.  One of the primary reasons that New Year’s resolutions often fall by the wayside is that the processes used to arrive at them are more likely to be superficially generated, rather than organically generated,.  Organically generated resolutions, the kind that are self-sustaining, are born out of the daily realities of our lived experiences and the lessons we are able to glean from intense reflection on those experiences. For behavior changes to be lasting, they must be fueled by an enduring sense that one’s life and one’s overall well being depends on successfully undergoing and maintaining the decided upon attitude or behavior change, e.g weight loss.

For too many people, New Year’s resolutions are not given the kind of thoughtful reflection deserving of decisions that are intended to, over the long term, enhance our daily lives. More often than not, they are made in the midst of a crisis, or on a whim, or under pressure from family, peers, colleagues, superiors and other members of our communities. Seldom are they driven by the life experiences that are often the bedrock of enduring and substantive life changes. What we therefore end up doing in making New Year’s resolutions is setting ourselves up for failure and all the attendant negative feelings of inadequacy, shame, guilt and disappointment that tend to accompany perceptions of failure.  

While New Year’s resolution’s may have a place in our cultural landscape and can have a tremendous impact in shaping the lives of some, for the vast majority of us, embracing the opportunity to start new each day is much more life giving and effective. In the Christian tradition, there is a wonderful hymn titled, Great is Thy Faithfulness, in which the songwriter reminds us, “Morning by morning new mercies I see.” This year, I would like to challenge those of you who engage in the practice of making New Year’s resolutions (and the rest of us as well) to consider embracing the reality that each day we awaken to a new beginning. Each day we have an opportunity to start fresh, “…forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead…” (Phil. 3:13b); and what lies ahead is our better selves. 

If we are sure of nothing else in this life, we are sure that whether we rise or not, the sun will. Therefore, let us give ourselves permission to ‘start fresh’ not just every day, but every moment. The truth is that every minute we get a new 60 seconds; every hour a new 60 minutes; every day a new 24 hours; every week a new seven days; and so on. We do not have to wait until the start of a New Year to resolve to make attitudinal or behavioral changes. We can do so daily if we resolve to learn the lessons our lived experiences are there to teach us; and as we learn those lessons we organically incorporate them into our daily interactions with families, colleagues and communities, thereby enhancing our lives continually without fear of failure and its attendant feelings of guilt shame and disappointment.

"LifeLines is a monthly column dedicated to addressing issues of mental, behavioural, and social health. The column appears on the 1st weekend of the month, and is written by professionals in the field of social work, mental health, and community medicine".