January 2, 2026
January arrives every year with the confidence of someone who has never met me before. It assumes I am ready for sweeping change, dramatic vows, and a version of myself who apparently thrives on early mornings and personal reinvention. This is puzzling, given the extensive historical record. If resolutions worked, I’d be done by now. Instead, the new year reliably invites a kind of ceremonial amnesia - a polite agreement to ignore the data and pretend that this time, with the right phrasing and enough enthusiasm, gravity will stop working.
Which brings to mind an unrelated-but-delightful anecdote from my childhood: my mother once told me about giving up church for Lent - not in her fifties, not after a decade of serious reflection, but as a teenager with an instinct for mischief and a healthy skepticism about symbolic self-denial. The image of someone earnestly trying to “improve” themselves by opting out of the very ritual that supposedly matters most is somehow exactly the kind of sideways move this season deserves.
That story doesn’t illuminate some grand truth. It simply highlights how easily we slip into ritual without asking whether the ritual makes sense for us. We line up every January 1st as if the calendar has discovered something we haven’t, and we perform these short-lived vows with all the earnestness of shoppers rushing for the latest fad gift or toy, convinced that this is the year it will finally change everything.
I don’t mean to dismiss reflection - the turn of the year is a perfectly reasonable time to look around and ask whether the direction still makes sense. What I object to is the theater of resolutions: the dramatic pronouncements, the public declarations, the sudden belief that a date on the calendar will succeed where accumulated self-knowledge has politely failed.
So this year, I’m not formally resolving anything. Not in the official sense, anyway. I won’t list goals drilled with the precision of a performance review or draft a dozen bullet points promising behavioral rearrangements that my past self has already quietly vetoed. I’m also not pretending that I’ll never change - history suggests I will, just not on command, and rarely in the ways I announce ahead of time.
What I am willing to do is notice. Notice what already works. Notice what quietly doesn’t. Notice the small adjustments I make without fanfare and the ones I resist no matter how motivational the language gets. If that sounds underwhelming, that’s probably because it is - and that may be its greatest value. The most enduring changes rarely arrive with fireworks and declarations. They creep along, sideways like my mom’s teenage logic, reshaping us in ways we only recognize later.
Maybe the point isn’t to resolve at all. Maybe the point is to stop pretending we don’t already know ourselves - to make room for change that arrives on its own terms, grounded in actual life rather than the calendar’s arbitrary rhythms.