Let’s talk about New Year’s resolutions. In the past I’ve tended to be leery of the whole undertaking, since to me there’s always seemed something a bit puritanical about the annual ritual of identifying personal shortcomings then declaring that, come January 1 (and not a moment sooner), we’re going to do something about them. This might be self-justification—the result of having failed to keep my own fair share of resolutions. Or perhaps it’s to do with having come of age in Australia, where so far as I can remember (more about that in a minute), there wasn’t much of a tradition of New Year’s resolution-making. Thirty years ago, when New Year’s Eve rolled around, most of the Australians I was spending time with seemed more interested in self-destruction than self-improvement. But perhaps eating and drinking like a Viking is just a benefit of being in one’s late teens and early twenties, no matter where one comes of age. It certainly tends to look better on twenty-somethings than it does on fifty-somethings, so hopefully most of those Australians have moved on. Now I’m beginning to suspect it’s time I did, too.
So it’s time to give the new year’s resolution another try—by resolving to spend 2022 on the wagon.
There … I said it. Perhaps doing so publicly is just the kind of incentive an ambitious experiment like giving up drinking for twelve months requires. This year marks my fifty-third trip around the sun. For the past thirty-five of those years, daily drinking has been pretty much a constant feature—a routine that began in late teenager-dom, accelerated to nihilistic proportions during college and the backpacking years that followed, then gradually settled into being a predictable cog in the clockwork of daily life. Of course, the thing about daily life is that the same stimuli tend to come around at the same time, every single day. When they do, they set off a conditioned response that Pavlov’s dog would’ve recognized immediately. Clock strikes five? They don’t call it “beer o’ clock” for nothing. Cooking dinner? That calls for a glass of wine. Friday night fire in the living room? Reach for the whiskey. After thirty-something years adhering to a drinking routine that I can no longer truthfully describe as “social,” those daily stimuli have started to pack a hefty punch. In an article titled “An Ex-Drinker’s Search for a Sober Buzz” that ran recently in the New Yorker magazine, John Seabrook writes that when he gave up drinking, he discovered that abstinence involved forgoing a lot more than just alcohol. “If you drank for forty years, as I did, the Pavlovian groove goes deeper,” Seabrook says, noting that to begin with, there were all sorts of social and professional settings that he had to avoid—so intense was the longing that they triggered for a drink. Most of all, Seabrook says that he missed “… the WASP-ish daily ritual of the cocktail hour,” the loss of which left him feeling that his days had been ‘wounded.’ As a thirty-year-member of the cocktail hour club, and of a society which marks time as a series of countdowns between one celebration and the next, (Twelfth night, Mardi Gras, crawfish season, St. Patrick’s Day, Jazz Fest, July 4, football season, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, etc.), my own Pavlovian groove runs deep indeed—“Grand-canyonesque,” you might even say. So, what better time than a new year to forgo the descent, and limit myself to sight-seeing from the rim? If only to prove to myself that I still can.
A year sounds like a mighty long time. Things could be worse, though. If we leave the years from 1920 to 1933 out of the equation, we are by many accounts living in a teetotaler’s golden age. What John Seabrook’s article was mostly about is the increasing number of American breweries dedicated to producing really good non-alcoholic beers. Lots of bars and restaurants now feature various interesting “mocktails.” And the range of reasons for giving one’s liver a hard-earned holiday—ranging from better sleep to improved cognitive performance—are better documented now than ever. Best of all, though: now that I’ve shouted my resolution from the rooftops, you, dear reader, are my co-conspirator. So if you meet me, out for lunch or dinner somewhere nursing my mocktail, raise a glass in my direction. We’ll toast to all the promise and possibility of 2022—a year in the clear. Fizzy water never tasted so good.
—James Fox-Smith, publisher
james@countryroadsmag.com
