By DOROTHY ROSBY
There’s something about January 1 that makes us think we can accomplish what we’ve never been able to accomplish before. And there’s something about January 5 that makes us realize we cannot.
I’ve decided that a failure to keep resolutions may stem from competing priorities. For example, maybe weight loss and good health are your priorities, but so is watching television while you sit on the sofa eating pizza and drinking beer. Or maybe being debt-free is important to you, but so is collecting sports cars. You can see how your resolution to pay off your debt might take a . . . back seat.
In order to keep our resolutions in 2014, we must clarify and commit to our deepest priorities, but first we have to know what they are. So as a public service, I’m going to tell you. NO! I’m joking! Only you can determine what’s truly important to you. But I’m going to tell you how NOT to prioritize your life by discussing some of the more foolish ways it’s done.
And the worst way is to base your priorities on what’s important to other people. I’m sure there are those who think I should have put up Christmas lights. Who are they to judge? Everyone has the same number of hours in a day, and some people choose to spend theirs decorating. I like to spend mine on activities that are more important to me, like driving around town looking at other people’s Christmas lights.
Depending on your stage of life, I can guarantee that at this very moment, someone somewhere is thinking you should get married, or have children, or have more children, or raise the children you have differently, or stop spoiling your grandchildren. You shouldn’t listen to any of them. You should listen to me.
Others suggest we base our priorities on what we want people to remember about us after we’re gone. Of course, we have no way of knowing how people will think of us. One hopes it’s not, “Dang. She owed me money.” But neither would we want it to be, “If nothing else, he mowed a perfect cross hatch,” or “Well, she wasn’t much of a friend, but at least she kept a clean house.” Naturally, we’d all like to be remembered as kind, generous, and wise. But who can act like that all the time? Oh, that we could all live up to our eulogy—and that we could all hear it.
The most foolish advice I’ve ever heard is that we should prioritize our life by living every day as if it were our last. I assume that means spending time with the people who mean the most to us. All well and good, but if your loved ones are using another method to determine their priorities, they may have other plans.
Plus there’s that little matter of self-fulfilling prophesy. If you’re living like it’s your last day, you probably won’t concern yourself with exercise, or five servings of fruits and vegetables a day, or routine colonoscopies. Too much living like it’s your last day, and it might happen a lot sooner than you’d hoped.
Not only that, if you’re living each day like it’s your last, you’ll never get your oil changed or your teeth cleaned. Depending on how you feel about your job, you might not even show up at work. If you had based your priorities on how you’d live the last day of your life, you might wake up January 1, 2014 with no job, car troubles, and bad teeth. That’s no way to start a new year.
