New Year’s Resolutions: A Thing of the Past?

After a hellish 2020, has the old custom of promising New Year’s resolutions taken on a new meaning?

Until now, New Year’s resolutions have been a playful proclamation of individual aims. Joining a gym. Giving up chocolate. Quitting smoking – a resolution made now for the third year in a row. We would always try to delude ourselves and our close circle of the sincerity of these ambitions but we always knew that any statement of intent followed by a chipper ‘New Year New Me!’ was unlikely to last beyond February. Okay, fine, January.

The difference this New Year, however, is the collective experience of navigating a global pandemic. Since March 2020, we have seen people involving themselves in community projects; increased interest in supporting small businesses and sustainable and environmental movements taking off. We understand now more than ever the impact of a FaceTime call with friends and family or a walk around the park with the dog – or just yourself and your headphones, if you’re me. Kindness, both to ourselves and to others, has been the current carrying us through the tidal wave of 2020.

Practicing Kindness in the Covid-19 Climate

Embracing kindness has, however, proven enormously challenging at times. As someone living with a clinically extremely vulnerable family member, watching friends and strangers on social media taking mindless and selfish risks has been difficult to understand. But I shouldn’t have to understand. Trying tirelessly to fathom the actions of others throughout 2020 has contributed unnecessarily to an already anxious and stressful year, to say the least. Letting go and sitting back, as, according to friends and family, an “overly-sensitive empath”, has been my biggest lesson learnt from lockdown. But does the intention to continue this emotional growth merely boil down to a New Year’s resolution? It simply feels too flippant.

2020 Has Been a Priority Reset

Yearly resolutions can sound frivolous, as reflected by our half-hearted determination to keep them, so will we be switching to changes in personal philosophy to replace resolutions? Is the yearly custom of New Year’s resolutions going to become an archaic ritual of the past? It might be too early in the New Year to answer these questions but I know I’ll be carrying lessons learnt from lockdown well into 2021 (and beyond).

 

Lucy Metters 

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