Resolutions Schmesolutions
It’s the time for resolutions. I don’t like resolutions. It’s extremely hard for me to stick to something I say I’ll do, I’m sorry to say. And yet, I’ve been committed to Sam for fifteen years, and have been doing massage and coaching for about the same amount of time. I have gone outside to exercise (to meditate, get aggression out, connect to nature, exercise the dogs, exercise myself, let huskies husky, and all of the above) almost daily since I was seventeen. Goodreads told me I read forty-nine books this year, so I can accomplish things, but living up to arbitrary resolutions isn’t one of them.
I’ve made all kinds of resolutions that didn’t take over the years, to the point that setting one almost guarantees I’ll rebel against it. Even if it’s something I want to do, it feels like a weight and obligation that I shirk. I’d go through the year feeling moderately incapable and somewhat disappointed in myself. Then, in the last few years, I decided to think of resolutions less as a stick to measure up to (and usually not meet) and instead an intention for the year, or an idea to keep in mind.
If nothing else, as time slips away faster than I can grasp, an end of the year recap helps me remember what happened over the careening year. What went well and what didn’t? What circumstances made things happen easily? What tasks or projects felt harder than they needed to be? What obstacles could I take away? What could be better moving forward? I don’t mean that in a harsh way, but rather how to make things easier.
One of my last reads of the year was Pema Chodron’s The Wisdom of No Escape and the Path of Loving-Kindness. It made me think of our constant striving to be better, and even how I work with athletes. She writes “the desire to change is fundamentally a form of aggression toward yourself.” The standard notion of resolutions is that we need to change in some way. But Chodron offers that “our hangups, unfortunately or fortunately, contain our wealth. Our neurosis and our wisdom are made of the same material.” Ahhhh. What a relief! I have so much more to say about her gem of a book, but reading it came at a perfect time, when I often start hatching plans to become a better version of myself. She talks about how simply doing the practice of meditation is transformative. That it’s not about changing yourself, but encourages readers instead to keep showing up and that over time patience, presence, and compassion emerge.
The same applies to training. Over the last several years I’ve noticed how hard many of my athletes are hard on themselves. We live in a society where setting and meeting high expectations is expected, normalized, and rewarded. But what if instead of setting high expectations, we let go of expectations? What if that allowed us to actually do more? What if small wins accumulated and over time you accomplish more than you ever thought you could? What if fitness emerges (this is a WHOLE bigger topic I have lots of thoughts on…)?
I started a writing practice during the pandemic and after five years, I am now someone who goes on writing retreats and more life changing than that, I write daily. I guess you could say I’ve become a writer: it’s become part of my life and part of myself, just like running or parenting. If I don’t write for a few days, I feel slightly off. One of the things this little practice has taught me is that a little bit adds up. For several years I wrote down my stream-of-consciousness for fifteen minutes, three times a week. That’s it. I rarely wrote more than that, but fifteen minutes wasn’t overwhelming and I could pretty easily squeeze it in. If I had set a goal of writing for an hour, or even half an hour each day I would rarely meet it and probably would have given up. But fifteen minutes was a doable, low enough bar and over time I looked forward to my writing time I carved out, even on the busiest days (especially on the busiest days!). Occasionally I would realize that I’d written a few minutes longer. Or instead of waiting a day to write, I wrote two days in a row. Last year I decided to transcribe all the notebooks I had filled and to my surprise, I had over 30,000 words! Of course most of it was drivel, but amid the muck, themes emerged repeatedly, and in the last year I’ve started molding the raw material into first drafts of essays. Now I spend time working on pieces in addition to emptying my mind onto the page. It’s still usually fifteen minutes, but often I’ll write for an hour without realizing it. Or not at all and I pick it up the next day. One of the biggest benefits I’ve noticed is that it’s easier to slip into writing than it used to be. I can grab my notebook and write for five minutes with surprising results (sometimes).
It’s just like training. Start where you are. Do the mundane work. Find pleasure in the daily practice, and over time you will shift-transform. Find what feels so easy that you’d barely count it, and watch it change, whether in terms of duration, effort, or reps. The trick is to maintain the beginner’s mind many years in. It’s so easy to look at my writing and want it to be something, or think that I somehow deserve it to be good (what even that even mean?!).
It’s funny. Since writing more, running is freer. I know it is something I just do, like parenting and massage and I’ve let go (mostly) of what I’d knotted together to make it more complicated. Writing has taken its spot as my existential dilemma. But if I can stay present and remember that I write because I want to and let go of any expectations of myself or my work, every so often I experience the same flow of a run where it feels like a dream: I’m floating, time simultaneously stops and passes in an instant, and I capture a bit of magic. And that’s worth practicing.
Happy New Year!
