I love New Year’s resolutions. Given my attention span of a goldfish, I can never usually be bothered with reflecting or planning, but New Year’s resolutions are my jam. Furtively scribbling in my journal, or rather less meditatively typing into my notes app on the bus, there’s nothing I love more at the end of December than coming up with a list of everything I need to do to be a better me in the New Year.
I admit it, there are a few goals that have been appearing on this list year after year for at least a decade now. Go to the gym 🙃. Reach out to family more often. Reply to Facebook messages on time. Start writing. The regularity of these aspirations is almost comforting: even if I find nothing else I want to change about myself, these familiar culprits remind me, year after year, that I have not yet attained “peak me”.
Believe me, I know that this is a terrible strategy for making New Year’s resolutions. Each year I, too, read those same articles about how to do it right: make SMART goals, break resolutions down into small steps, keep yourself accountable, and so on.
And each year this information goes into one ear and out the other. I know those articles provide the recipe for success, but aiming small and tracking my habits and all the rest of it seems so boring and puritanical. I want to throw caution to the wind and let myself dream big in my New Year’s resolutions, just for a moment.
New Year’s Eve always had a special, dreamy, sparkly vibe about it for me. Think glittery eyeshadow and bright lipstick and disco balls and bubbly champagne; elegant jewelry and music and magical fireworks and decadent desserts. This is the feeling that New Year’s Eve evokes for me. Fantasy and daydream are the driving ethos, not goal-setting worksheets and habit trackers. I have an entire new year coming up to be sensible, but just for one night, I let myself fall into the fantasy of my dream life without worrying about how achievable this vision is.
And let me tell you, it feels good to stop worrying about time and money and peer pressure and all the myriad other constraints, real and imagined, that plague our everyday thoughts. Such thinking might seem frivolous, but it’s actually quite the opposite, because it allows you to think more honestly about a very important question. Namely, what is it you really want in life, if you could do anything? And then you get a moment to play in your vision, before you preemptively tell yourself it’s impossible without even trying it on for size.
A few years ago, I went all out and wrote down a list of all the resolutions I’d be achieving if I could live my dreams. At the time, this included things like moving to a mountain village in Austria where I could ski every day, opening a coffee shop, writing a book, and running an Iron Man.
It was instructive and fun to think about what it is I’d really want, if I could magically remove all constraints. It felt like I’d never allowed myself to think so freely. Previously, I would have never allowed a thought like ‘write a book’ to even enter my head (I haven’t ever written anything publishable! I haven’t made a name for myself! I know nothing!), but that time I just let myself write it down. It’s not like anyone else would ever see it.
As you imagine, I am yet to achieve any of those things. But that’s ok - because I now have a better picture of what I really want and where I should be headed.
That, in my view, is where January 1 comes in. If New Year’s Eve feels like glitter and decadence, then Jan 1 feels like refreshment and grounding. I make a mug of herbal tea, crack open the spine of a brand new journal, and get ready to bring my dreams back to reality.
Let’s be real, I’m not going to write a book next year, but I could try to write on Substack more regularly. Moving to the mountains might be a bit extreme, but I could start saving some money for a ski holiday.
My fantastical New Year’s resolutions are just dreams, after all - but I can still try to bring a bit of their shine into my reality. I’m never going to wake up one day and find myself suddenly living my fantasy life, but I can work to bring some parts of it into my everyday, bit by bit.
But it’s only by allowing yourself to dream big that you can uncover what your dream really is in the first place. The huge, awe-inspiring experiences and achievements that make all the discipline and effort of maintaining resolutions worth it. It won’t give you an action plan or weekly check-ins, but it will give you direction and motivation; a compass pointing you to your true north, and a gentle push to get you going. And, without direction and momentum, where would you even start?