The Glorious Year of "Yeah, That's Not Gonna Happen" |
This is the year of “Yeah, That’s Not Going to Happen.”
This is the year I will not learn German, calligraphy, or how to zip-line.
Will I become an expert in the smokey-eye look, make a perfect soufflé, or perform the kind of emergency procedure where you save a stranger's life by puncturing their throat with a Bic pen?
Yeah, no. That’s not gonna happen.
I am not giving up carbs or caffeine, or ever again using the word curate when discussing how to organize a sock drawer.
I can no longer afford the luxuries of self-inflicted self-diminishment. It’s too easy to make myself feel bad. The challenge has gone out of it.
Not. Going. To. Happen.
I'm tired of all the self-talk I've heard about being better, being stronger, being more self-disciplined, and being--c'mon already, are you kidding? --more serene.
Not going to happen.
Instead, I'm trading in the idea of perfecting myself for the real possibility of enjoying myself.
The first is unachievable; the second is, to a certain extent, within my control, which makes the aspiration both reasonable and fun.
In the pause between the year we're leaving and the year ahead, we’re usually encouraged to draw up blueprints for impossibly better selves. In so doing, we forge crazily capricious commitments to agendas we know, on some level, will inevitably send us into despair.
These lead to self-recrimination more often than they lead to self-improvement.
Fantasies are not strategies. False promises don’t underwrite success. I can write a check for $20 million but if I have only $19.19 in my account, it’s not going to work.