American folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote these “New Year’s Rulin’s” in his journal about eight decades ago.PUBLIC DOMAIN
Benjamin Errett resolves to keep writing a free weekly newsletter filled with this sort of thing at GetWitQuick.com.
Here’s a slam-dunk resolution: Summon your willpower, ignore distractions, believe in yourself and resolve to finish reading this sentence. There! You’ve accomplished an arbitrary stupid goal and are ready to charge into 2024.
Hold up, you exclaim. Isn’t this the time of year for deep reflection and serious self-improvement? If you can’t fix your profound character flaws in the first 10 days of January, when can you fix them? But as watertight as that logic may seem, the truly wise know better.
Writing about resolutions as his curmudgeonly alter ego Samuel Marchbanks in the Peterborough Examiner in 1946, Robertson Davies explained that he “outgrew such folly long ago.”
“Any betterment in my character will be the outcome of prolonged meditation, and slow metabolic and metaphysical reform – a psychosomatic process, in other words,” he wrote.
Try one of these techniques instead of conventional New Year’s resolutions
No major initiatives, then, but maybe some smaller stuff? Tamara Shopsin titled her 2017 “no-muss memoir” Arbitrary Stupid Goal, and in those three words she captures the best approach to resolutions, and arguably life itself.
The illustrator’s father would often tell of the Wolfawitzes, a family who took a two-week road trip to “to as many towns, parks, and counties as they could that contained their last name: Wolfpoint, Wolfville, Wolf Lake, etc.” Along the way, they stopped at whatever caught their interest. By the end of the trip, they agreed it was the best they’d ever had.
Hence the Arbitrary Stupid Goal, a way to “get around the fact that we will all die and there is no real point to life.” Picking a Meaningful Wise Goal is not the answer because you’ll most probably fail or, if you can somehow develop the monomaniacal focus needed to succeed, end up miserable.
“But with the ASG there is a point,” Ms. Shopsin writes. “It is not such an important point that you postpone joy to achieve it. It is just a decoy point that keeps you bobbing along, allowing you to find ecstasy in the small things, the unexpected, and the everyday.”
The cover of Arbitrary Stupid Goal features an illustration of a football player about to kick the ball. The next page shows the football impaled on the player’s foot like a kebab on a skewer. It’s a cartoon, Ms. Shopsin explains, about “living life so fully that the whole point of the game changes.”
So definitely keep bobbing along, but a little self-improvement around the edges couldn’t hurt. On that score, turn to folk singer Woody Guthrie’s New Year’s Rulin’s, penned 81 years ago but still relevant. They begin with Work More and Better, continue to Drink Scant If Any, Learn People Better, Don’t Get Lonesome, and finish strong with Wake Up And Fight.
His best rulin’ is the one that implicitly concedes we’re all working with crooked timber over here: Wash Teeth If Any.
A great resolution meets your teeth where they are, or aren’t. The British theatre critic James Agate published his personal diaries throughout his life under the title Ego, and in January, 1942, he publicly committed to two resolutions with built-in escape hatches:
1. To refrain from saying witty, unkind things, unless they are really witty and irreparably damaging.
2. To tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
And so it’s worth remembering that a resolution needn’t be positive. Starting in the 1960s, the New York columnist Jimmy Breslin would write an annual column of “People I’m Not Speaking to This Year.” It was no joke, he explained in the 1971 edition:
“These are the people who not only miss the point of my list – it is real and I dislike everyone on it – but they also miss the entire idea of how to live a life. For in the six-furlong sprint from high school to funeral parlor, the hardest of all jobs is surrounding yourself only with people who give off friendly vibrations. Anybody else is a detriment to your life and should be avoided at any cost.”
Average life expectancy has increased to almost eight furlongs since Mr. Breslin wrote those words – all the more reason to take his advice to heart. Friendly vibrations, washed teeth, ecstasy in small things, just a touch of irreparably damaging wit if any: You smashed the arbitrary and very smart goal of finishing this article, so please consider all these resolutions within reach.