A new year: the paradox of change

All change requires letting go and moving on

Ben and me, late December 2021

I don’t keep New Year’s resolutions, for the same reason I don’t like the annual what-are-you-giving-up-for-Lent question: change cannot be forced, or else it becomes contrived. And short-lived.

When I think about what it means to change, I realize that it has a lot to do with ambivalence, that way in which we stall because we aren’t sure how to reconcile conflicting feelings or thoughts or beliefs or needs. We want to change, because we recognize specific ways we can improve our lives. But we don’t want to change, because it requires a stepping away from what has become commonplace, familiar, and comfortable to us.

There is always an amalgam of fear and hope when we approach any life change.

Whenever I draw closer to any life decision, even if it’s something as arbitrary as a New Year’s resolution or what to give up for Lent, I picture myself sitting astride a fence: on one side, there is the not-yet; on the other side, there is the already-been. It’s the space between then and when where I find myself wavering for a time—not because I am indecisive or a procrastinator by nature, but because it’s important for me to work up enough courage to take the first step toward something new, something different, something that might fail.

Fear is what paralyzes us. It keeps us inert, stagnant, frozen. There are all sorts of reasons we fear anything, particularly change: we don’t want to feel the discomfort of being stretched; we don’t want to lose what we have already achieved; we don’t like being wrong; we don’t want to waste our time; we think we might screw everything up.

The psychologist Harry Levinson coined the phrase, “All change involves loss, and all loss must be mourned.”¹

Therefore, I ask myself: what am I losing when I face any life transition? And what does that mean about how I feel about the void of letting go of who I once was or what I attained? How can I grieve the past without allowing it to interfere with my personal progress?

New Year’s resolutions are meant to propel us into this growth mindset, but most of us do not commit to the lofty goals we set for ourselves. This is why I abandoned the practice many years ago. True, lasting growth must be intrinsically motivated, which means there must be an internal incentive that motivates me to alter the place I find myself in right now.

Do I want to be healthier? Why? What does that mean, and how can I begin with small steps forward today? Maybe that means drinking more water, so I use a water bottle and fill it up as soon as it’s emptied. Maybe that means cutting out refined sugar. Or taking a long walk. Or setting aside my technology for an allotted time every day. Or scheduling an appointment with a therapist once a week.

Health and wellness, as an industry, falsifies this sense that we can become fit, happy, and energized from some magic supplement or better exercise equipment or listening to a particular motivational speaker on a weekly podcast. They capitalize on our susceptibility to be influenced by the power of suggestion or by groupthink. And we often fall for their tactics. I have.

Something shifted in the way I viewed this whole resolution industry several years ago when I was raising one baby after another and barely had time to do little more than scarf a few scraps of what my kids left on their plates, wash it down with a mouthful of whatever beverage was handy, and check the clock in desperation for the countdown until I could take a nap.

It wasn’t that I didn’t desire to be a healthier version of myself. I did. I just didn’t know where to begin, because I was constantly overwhelmed by rotating through onesies, spit-up, diapers, meals, and baths for the littles. That’s when I stopped trying to conform to this construct of fit and healthy, because realistically, I was sloppy, overweight, and exhausted.

Placing unrealistic expectations on ourselves is what sets us up for failure. When I was at my most desperate—2020, during the peak of the pandemic—I could barely walk around the block without pain or becoming winded. I was approaching forty but kept piling on new health problems, including dangerously high blood sugar levels and high blood pressure. My weight had ballooned to a point where I was no longer comfortable in my body. In fact, I felt deeply ashamed of it.

I asked myself one day, How did I get here and what can I do about it? Until that moment, I had resigned myself to this sort of powerlessness, a story I concocted that prevented me from an honest examination of my life. Unknowingly, I was protecting myself from feeling the deep-seated shame that accompanied facing myself truthfully. But my life had reached a point where my fear of not changing outweighed my need to protect my ego and maintain the status quo.

My goal at the time was to become more physically fit. In my ambitious mind, I thought of buying a gym membership, lifting weights, running on the elliptical. In fact, I pictured a leaner, more toned version of myself instantly, which motivated me to move toward this abstract idea of physical fitness. Then, the truth bomb: I could not go from barely walking one block to hefting weights overnight.

Discouragement surfaced, until I looked at my surroundings. A simple solution occurred to me: Just walk one block a day until you can walk two. And keep going.

For some reason, this worked for me. At first, I felt ashamed that I was pushing myself to complete a small goal. Because of this, I told no one what I was aspiring to do or how hard it was for me to walk (slowly) such a short distance. Knowing that midlife was upon me, my desire to live the second half of my life more fully engaged, rather than disconnected from it, launched me forward.

Every day, I walked around the block one time and returned home.

Eventually, I noticed I was not huffing and puffing anymore. So I decided to add a lap around the block a second time. This stretched me for a few days. The pain returned about halfway around the second rotation, but I challenged myself to finish. Until one day I could walk two laps with ease. And then I added a third.

I worked my way up to two miles a day, which I maintained for about two years, at which point I added weight lifting to my weekly exercise regimen, using the same mentality: slow and steady—not too much, too fast.

There was nothing extraordinary about my strategy. In fact, it was the opposite. It was simple, straightforward, attainable. Something inside my head decided to chuck the belief that I needed certain equipment or amount of time or specific workout clothes in order to transform my physical health. What worked was that I erased the marketing images tossed at me on a regular basis, especially after New Year’s Day, and replaced them with the realistic understanding that the only pathway to change involved two things:

1. Showing up every day, and

2. Persevering through the setbacks.

That’s really all it takes for you or me to do something different in our lives. A growth mindset requires some amount of grit, in order to endure the inevitable hardships that threaten our goals. The primary reason we do not stick with our good intentions to become better versions of ourselves is this: when we come upon some type of adversity, we quit instead of continuing onward. And then we start blaming ourselves for messing up, and the Inner Critic hurls reason after reason why we never seem to follow through with anything.

New Year’s Day feels exhilarating to us, because a new calendar year feels exactly like an unwritten book: no rough edges, no coffee stains, no scratches and scribbles or torn pages. Somehow, we convince ourselves that, come September, the entire year somehow “flew by” and now we’re nearing the last stretch to December 31, when we can watch the ball drop at midnight, clink our champagne flutes, and say to ourselves, “At least it’s a new year, and I will do better. Good things are coming.”

New beginnings happen all the time, though. You can start over whenever you want, or need, to. You can begin today, whether it is January 1 or March 23 or October 15. The cycle of endings and beginnings continues, irrespective of what day of the year it is.

Sometimes our failed attempts at change signal that we need to pay attention to the deeper needs and desires of our hearts that we’ve left unattended. Until we can accept the small deaths and endings that mark the losses of every change, we will not persist through them to reach the new life and hopeful beginnings that appear in moments we miss while we lament what we’ve lost.

1. Retrieved from https://insightfulmanagers.com/2011/08/02/change-and-a-sense-of-loss/