New Year's Considerations

I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I figure life doles out plenty of challenges for each of us without having to heap disappointment on ourselves. And hey, if you don’t MAKE them, you can’t BREAK them, right? But I will keep in mind a few New Year’s Considerations this year…

1. I might try to lose more weight this year. I’ve been on every diet known to the modern world: grapefruit, cabbage soup, South Beach, Atkins, pictures of yourself in a bikini at 16 on the fridge (really more torture than diet), Fit for Life, Pritikin, Christmas Cookie (a recent diet invention of my own), macrobiotic, probiotic, Korean rice, soybean sprouts & hot bean paste, wine & cheese (another original), and many more. I’m now on my second go-round with Weight Watchers, which is really just group therapy for folks who, after years of vehemently defending the “big boned,” “slow metabolism,” or “laying on of fat is a geographical survival adaptation of northern climate female populations” defenses, have finally had to suck it up and admit they need to eat fewer calories than they burn.

2. It’s possible I could recycle more, turn the compost, eat more locally grown foods, set up rain barrels, drive less, investigate grey water recycling, figure out one new way to cook tofu, consume less, and reduce my carbon footprint. I’d like to convert my car to burn discarded cooking oil, but I’m afraid the french-fry smell would attract teenagers. I’ll try doing these things not because Al Gore says so or because cute polar bears are stuck on ice floes, but because it’s the right thing to do, dangit.

3. I might try to move a little more this year. I have a deep-seated and probably pathological aversion to the E word…the Total Gym, Sweatin’ to the Oldies, no-pain-no-gain word. Still, I may swim a bit so I can have a sauna afterward, I may briskly walk down the road to visit the neighbor’s horses with apples, I will definitely dance like a fool tonight when Ray’s band plays, and I may gyrate along with a “Bellydancing 101” DVD when no one’s around. But I’ll be doing these things because I feel like it, not because they’re…you know…the E word…

4. I’ll try to remember, in spite of a long, proud, and sometimes amusing family history of verbal sparring & heated debate, that sarcasm is NOT humor, and I may work at curbing my evil sarcastic tongue.

5. I might try harder to give more and take less, knowing how wealthy I am in all the ways that count.

6. I will try to get Stella, my African Grey parrot, to say something witty and profound. Her current favorites (which she repeats ad nauseum until she has new favorites) are: a one-sided phone conversation complete with dialing beeps, laughs, perfectly inflected but muffled conversation, and a hang-up beep; a small puppy whine (her newest); a large dog barking at a distance; the sound of tapping on the side of a coffee grinder; her favorite request, “Want some pasta?”; and a tuberculin cough that sometimes turns into a coughing jag lasting several minutes (she picked this up when Ray had a cold a couple years back).

7. Maybe I’ll give meditation another serious go believing, as I do, that it’s THE key to direct experience of the Divine, whatever that turns out to be. I think somewhere in the Bible (and the Koran, Talmud, Pali canon, and every other sacred text) it says, “Thou shalt shut up and let Me get a word in edgewise.”

8. I could try to knit a sweater. A whole sweater. I have several half-sweaters, a back and one sleeve, say, or a front and a hood, in a Rubbermaid tub. I consider these “done” and am just waiting for the right person to whom I can give them.

9. If I get the chance, I’ll remind my grown children that when they lived at home, their clean clothes were always folded, not balled up on the living room floor where they ended up as dog beds, cat toys, or foot paths. I may explain to them, again, that clean dishes are one of life’s little luxuries, and that having a full-time job with health insurance does not make one a “flunkie sell-out patsy for the Man.”

10. I might make every effort to be kinder and more universally compassionate, open-minded, honest, and spiritually centered. I may try each day to do the RIGHT THING (in spite of constant human bickering, we all know what the RIGHT THING is).

So I’ll give each of these considerations some serious…considering. After all, tomorrow—January 1, 2009—is the first day of the rest of…well…2009. Then again, I may spend the year snarling, pouting, lazing in a lawn chair, and eating chocolate oranges. We’ll see.