…to this crazy game show of life. No real winners in this one—unless maybe you’re talking to Steve Harvey.
As always, the end of the break comes far too soon. We all come back lamenting the various ways we’d planned to utilize the days most effectively: catching up on sleep, reading that lonely book hiding in the middle of your desk, meeting up with old friends, etc. No matter how much time we get off, it’s never enough.
Even in grade school, although at the start of summer vacation two months felt like more than ample time to goof off, when September rolled around those two months may as well have been two minutes. It’s typical of the human psyche—always focusing on the now and never quite comprehending the future, however much we may plan for it.
It’s one of the reasons it’s about as easy to find people following through on their New Year’s resolutions by March as it is to find a Canadian Tire employee. We all like the idea of self-improvement, especially when it’s the popular thing to do to kick off January, but the difficulty is that some of us have a hard time starting. Just as making plans with friends over the break doesn’t seem too tough since there’s several weeks to do so, resolutions are often left by the wayside before they’ve even been attempted because there’s a whole year in which to accomplish them. As for those who aren’t plagued by procrastination, they usually peter out soon enough due to a combination of their goals being a tad ambitious and the fact that everyone else is dropping like flies around them.
I don’t usually give much thought to resolutions. The last one I remember was two or three years ago; I decided to avoid my weakness at the time—pork rinds. For the record, I succeeded. Closely related to the reasons above, New Year’s resolutions seem like such a silly societal tradition if the majority of them will never come to fruition. Why join in on an en masse failure?
Fact of the matter is that if you really want to change, you don’t need a New Year’s resolution to do so. And if you’re hesitant about making an effort, realize that putting a few words to paper, or even merely vocalizing your goal, isn’t going to make any difference whatsoever.
So, without further ado, I’m going to train my cat to use the toilet.
Danke danke,
Eric Wilkins
