New Year's Revolutions

From Menletter December 2003

By Tim Baehr

That's not a typo up there. I really do mean revolutions.

Many of us do it every year: at year-end, or in the quiet afternoon of New Year's Day, or at 3:00 a.m. when we're moody and sick of our lives, we come up with the Grand List: the infamous New Year's Resolutions. Sometimes we make a mental list; sometimes we write it down. Either way, the resolutions sit in our psyches, eating away at us with all their "shoulds" and sharp-toothed guilt.

In the face of annual failure, I finally gave up on these resolutions; I couldn't stand it that by the second month, or second week, or even the second day, the resolutions had been abandoned for the status quo. I can barely remember what some of them were, but I do recall a few:

Get a better job

Work harder and get promoted

Lose some weight

Write a novel

Travel to an exotic locale

Get control of my finances

You may be able to see what the problem is with these. They're too big. How the heck do I "get a better job"? Does it just materialize because I look in the Sunday want-ads for a few weeks? "Write a novel"? Sure, about what? When? I already have a full-time job and then some.

Then I can figure out how to go about achieving it.

But there's another problem, too: the idea of a list itself. This isn't a menu or shopping list. Even with two items, the list is too long. I need to do some careful thinking here and come up with the one thing that might revolutionize my life in the coming year.

So I'll start with a question to narrow things down:

Who sez?

The purpose of this confrontational question is to make me think of why I should have a particular goal in the first place. I'm a good writer. I should be good enough and clever enough to write a great novel. It might bring me fame and fortune. But I feel no inner compelling need to write a novel. It's time to cross that perennial "should" off my list forever and find some other goal with more passion in it.

Working harder and getting promoted? Nice; that's what men are supposed to do. But do I make enough money now? Yes. Do I want a job managing others? No. Would more power at work make me happier? No. Another "should" bites the dust.

There are other ways to narrow the list; mostly, I have to discover which goal is the one thing I need most in this stage of my life. Then I have to figure out how to get there.

How about two old cliches: "The longest journey begins with a single step" and "If you don't know where you're going, any path will get you there" (or its variant, "If you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else"). I'll translate these into two questions:

Where am I going? This may be the item on my one-item list, or it may be some grander scheme that this item is a part of.

What is the first step? This is the one thing I must do to embark on the path to the goal.

OK, so now I might have some idea of a worthy goal and a first step. And still I'm stuck. In the deepest recesses of my psyche, I know that something is keeping me from acting, from taking that first step. Maybe it's time to rethink things. Maybe this journey stuff is the wrong metaphor.

A new metaphor occurs to me. Think of a pile of logs that need to be split for firewood. Weathering may even have opened up a small crack in some that I can get my fingers into. I can pull and yank all day, and that crack won't budge. I'm stuck.

Notice that I may be willing to work very hard at this wood pile. I might stay out all day and night banging on the logs, throwing them against each other, working up a good sweat. Some of the logs may actually split from this manhandling. And just before I abandon the whole project, I'll notice that I've gotten virtually nowhere.

But if I put a wedge against a log and hit it with a sledge hammer, pow! The log splits and I've achieved some progress toward my goal. I repeat the process and the wedge gets stuck. I keep at it. Once in a while I might hit my shin with the hammer. I keep at it. Eventually I get pretty good at the task, and soon there's a cord of firewood stacked up and ready for the stove.

Bring this image to some kind of life-changing goal: what is the "wedge" that will get the job started? It may be a physical tool or a psychic one. I may have to go find it or maybe even make it. I may even have to wait, to be on the alert so I'll recognize it if I stumble upon it. But without some kind of wedge, some kind of tool, I'll be wasting my energy.

So, for the coming year, my task is to identify one thing I want to change, figure out a first step, and find the one tool, some kind of wedge, that will get me started.