A new year promises renewed attempts to ditch the same old you, the one with warts that thwart self-esteem. Longing for perfection has teased us for millennia as has believing we can shape a pristine new identity by making resolutions for the new year. The pitfall is that many of us end up wallowing in the quagmire of bad habits. We naively continue to play a game most simply cannot win. Who the heck is responsible for this misery?
Blame it on the Babylonians of four thousand years ago, who feared their gods would not allow them to keep on keeping on if they didn’t clean up their sloppy ways. At the beginning of their lunar calendar and a new agricultural cycle in mid-March, they celebrated the eleven-day festival of Akitu, meaning “head of the year.” The celebration strengthened relationships between the gods and their civilization and reaffirmed the bond between mortals and nature. Theirs was an ancient agrarian society dependent on whims of nature seemingly controlled by fickle gods. Simple, practical resolutions focused on pleasing their gods by keeping communities harmonious. They resolved to repay debts and return farm tools borrowed from neighbors in the past year, repairing the tools when necessary. If fixing and returning a shovel warded off droughts, floods, insect hoards, or threats to sowing and harvesting their food supply, Babylonians were happy to cough up the shovel and other random borrowed tools lying around in their fields.
Romans also made bargains with gods believed to control fate, resolving to improve habits at the new year; but the date for the year’s start shifted due to calendar tweaking. The ancient Roman calendar, lunar like the Babylonians’, had ten months, March through December without January and February. Because the original calendar ignored winter, it was seasonally out of sync. Roman calendar fiddling began with Numa Pompilius in 700 BC, with two winter months filling the void for a twelve-month solar calendar, which was the basis for the Julian calendar. The year’s beginning was no longer a spring thing, however; the new month that marked the beginning of the year was neatly named for the two-faced god Janus: patron of gates, doorways, endings, and beginnings, who looked backward to the past and forward to the future, prompting Romans to review their behavior in the prior year and resolve to improve by doing good deeds for others in the new year. Presumably, recipients of kindness were fellow Romans, not empire enemies.
In the fourth century, when Christianity became the official religion of Rome, the Church snuffed out anything reeking of paganism—like gods named Janus and wild parties honoring him on the eve of the new year. Prayer and fasting to please God replaced resolutions to please plural gods, and the celebration became the Catholic holy day of the Circumcision. Then in 755 AD, the Council of Tours proclaimed that starting the year in January was a dumb pagan error and changed it to Easter, dooming traditional New Year’s resolutions and focusing on Lenten sacrifice. The only form of medieval resolution was the “Peacock’s Vow” made by knights to keep chivalry alive. When, in 1582, Pope Gregory restored January 1 as the year’s start, he did not restore New Year’s resolutions.
At a later time in another place, American and European Puritans shunned uttering a pagan god’s name, calling January “the First Month” while urging the flock to spend pensive time looking back—like Janus, ironically—to reassess their prior behavior while making a new covenant with God to practice restraint, using God-given talents, avoiding sinful habits, and being charitable. Unwittingly, Puritans were emulating pagan resolution practices, putting their own spin on them. The ultimate example is a collection of seventy resolutions by New England’s theologian, preacher, and philosopher Jonathan Edwards, who reviewed them privately as a personal reminder each week. His resolutions included “to live with all my might” and “never to speak evil of anyone—to dishonor them unless for some real good reason.” Thus the resolution seed was replanted, but flowered only after widespread suffering during the Great Depression; the changing tide made New Year’s resolutions a national practice, when twenty-five percent of American adults resolved to jumpstart the economy by working with F.D.R.’s New Deal programs, designed to achieve Relief, Recovery, and Reform.
Like the Babylonians, we respond to New Year’s “Fresh Start Effect” (the idea that important temporal moments prompt a reinvigorated commitment to goals). Modern resolutions, however, are rarely spiritual, moral, or altruistic; they tend more towards remaking our bodies than resolving to reduce carbon footprints. Resolutions present a mixed bag of the good (we examine our values to define who and what we can be), the bad (we are set up for failure, undermining self-esteem), and the ugly (accepting our inability to change certain things). Psychologists advise that when breaking ingrained bad habits, individuals should recognize the difficulty of reversal, realistically assess the probability of success sans professional help, and form a plan. For instance, should I resolve (again) to be less scatterbrained, without a definite strategy I’d fail (again) and be part of the eighty percent who chuck resolutions by Valentine’s Day.
Experts offer suggestions: 1. Think first, then write specific goals. 2. Spill the beans, telling family and friends your resolution, including on social media, to create support groups. 3. Track progress. 4. Reward yourself with indulgences that don’t bomb resolutions. 5. If last year’s resolution flopped, but is important to you, refocus and try again.
Resolutions are a worthy tradition, particularly if we go for the greater good and join efforts to make the world a better place through volunteering, charitable contributions, and ecological awareness. Though changes for better health are essential, resolving to attain personal perfection is a trap. For sanity’s sake, resolve to remember that being human means being flawed and heed Salvador Dali’s warning: “Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it.”
Lucile readily admits that being married to Mr. Organization himself has saved her from having to resolve to become more efficient and thanks her lucky stars in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
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