Shreya Sen-Handley | Tricks To Make Those New Year Vows Stick

“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there,” novelist L.P. Hartley had pithily pronounced, leaving the reader to willy-nilly it about. Certainly, at no time is the distance between past and present more in evidence, at least in the popular imagination, than in the month of January, just after the previous year has ended and another begun with fanfare. Ironically, when this chasm we’ve conjured, this elaborate leap between one year and another, appears at its greatest, the past is, in fact, adjacent.

At the start of every newly-minted year, we ambitiously resolve to completely change ourselves, setting out to “do things differently” with a vengeance. Those who’ve never even twiddled their thumbs will aspire to baton-twirling. Cookie Monsters will go on extreme diets, allowing themselves only gulps of air as sustenance. Even the less deluded will decide to tackle something as the year starts, that was discarded in the last, parroting the insistence on transformative odysseys that make distant shores of our past.

Only the mind-numbing mix of winter’s stretching shadows, post-festivity torpor, and our very human penchant for perpetual optimism, bamboozles us into believing we can change overnight, or that we need to! Merrily pulling the wool over our own eyes, in step with this shimmering season, we fervently want to believe what’s done is done (and dusted too), and clean breaks and cleaner slates are essential.

But are they?

How deep into January did your nuts-only-lunch/barefoot-hikes/grinning-till-your-cheeks-smart last? It’s merely human to be epic-fails and tryhards, giving up on rock-climbing/fastidious-flossing/olive-branching, before a fortnight has passed. And though disappointing to quit so fast, it’s no surprise, having been there, done that, and put the wooden spoons away every year.

So, why do it at all? Oh, there’s room for improvement in everyone, even at the stuff we’re spiffy at. We should undoubtedly strive to better ourselves therefore, but with the drip-drip of manageable doses. The whooshing sweep of our start-of-year overhauls is what trips us up. That overriding impulse to take a 360-degree turn from everything you are, both good and bad, naturally culminates in a springing back, and with the speed of a whiplash.

If you’ve tried to go vegan three-years-in-a-row and choked, or attempted wild-swimming at the crack of dawn when you’re a landlubbing night bird, you’re fighting your very nature and should stop. Ignore the influencers, wellness gurus and lifestyle hackettes, and listen to your knees instead (your inner voice even more). What you can improve and how, is predicated on your unique mental and physical make-up, and what’s that if not everything you’ve become over time, aka. your past?

In my youth, I did my share of running away — literally — from problems, moving countries to distance myself from the trauma I’d experienced, till I realised that “wherever I go, there I am”, and Confucius was ace. I couldn’t leave my problems behind because it was part of my past, and my past was in my DNA (and not just metaphorically). I’ve written about this in my first book ‘Memoirs of My Body’ and since I only have limited column space, for a fuller explanation may I point you that way?

Or, indeed, to the sagacity of singing-songwriting legend Bruce Springsteen, who, in his own memoir, Born to Run, states, “No one you’ve been and no place you’ve gone ever leaves you. The new parts of you simply jump in the car and go along for the rest of the ride…” In MTV-speak, the ghostly framework of your old jalopy will always be there, no matter how much you “pimp your ride”!

As we enter another new year then, is our resolve to improve on who we are utterly redundant? Not remotely! The truth we forget every January as we make our improbable plans to radically change, is that who we already are, though not the finished product, has much to recommend it.

Far from the biblical dogma of Original Sin, we do not come into this world tainted and predestined to fail. There’s no inherent evil in us as per religious fairy tales, but I cannot agree with the Aristotelian idea of humans as tabula rasa, or blank pages at birth, either, having birthed and brought up two with distinct — although naturally not fully formed — personalities as newborns. We’ve innate potential at inception, which can blossom into brilliance with nurture, or wither from neglect.

The trick then is to look at self-improvement, that on which every NY resolution hinges, as a slow but steady build on foundations already laid. Continuously tweaking malfunctioning nibnobs, but equally, returning to the drawing board when needed, and never, never bringing it ALL crashing down, to rebuild something brand new but disjointed in its place. With bricks and mortar bagged from elsewhere (Grok, TikTok, Ragnarok) as it is these days! Do that and you’re back to square one, having learnt nothing and evolved little.

Why not make only one resolution next Jan, one that’s easily renewed every twelve months? One that, in fact, lasts a lifetime because it springs organically from your own lifestyle? How ’bout you make it one that also really counts? Self-improving it should be, of course, but in ways that help the universe. Knit, for example, if that warms your heart, but make a hat or two for the homeless in winter. As for this year? Just make it a good ’un.