Making resolutions beyond ourselves

We all know the deal with New Year’s resolutions.

They’re often made and seldom kept. At minimum, they’re optimistic. At maximum, they’re impossible.

The best kept ones are internalized while the least successful are too often spoken out of existence.

For many, they’re long shots. Yet for some reason, when the winter days draw short and the nights turn cold, we reflect back and project forward. The resolutions we make show characteristics of the versions of ourselves we most want to be. If they help you inch even a smidge closer to becoming that person, then resolutions — for lack of a better word — are good.

While you stew on the year that was and the year to come, think about the goals that don’t just move you toward the person you want to be — the improvements you wish to make — but also think about how to improve the people and community around you.

Of course, that’s easier said than done. And truthfully, there are already so many who do make decisions and live lives to positively affect those around them as much, if not more, than themselves.

Truly, this is not to lecture or pass judgment. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with attempts at self-improvement, successful or otherwise. The one behind these words could stand to embody and learn from these same lessons.

So while making your resolutions, and deep down, realizing how feasible they may or may not be, take the opportunity to apply that inner eye toward change outward.

Heading into what stands to be a contentious election year — hot on the trail of the contentiousness of recent years — maybe now is the time to home in on the familiar lessons we too often forget, and that the holidays remind us of.

These resolutions are easier to embody than they are to measure, and easier to forget than they are to remember. They may not be novel, but who knows, they just may stick.

-Jake Goodrick, Gillette News Record