Resolution

I don’t make Resolutions for the New Year, not anymore, haven’t for years. I never found much use in it. I make make plans every morning in the shower–eat healthier, exercise more, spend less money: a fairly standard list–and have broken them by the next morning’s shower. There are always so many excuses in the meantime, so many distractions, so many understandable lapses. Having them attached to the New Year seems to add an absurd amount of pageantry to an empty ritual. Plus, if anyone asks what my Resolutions are, I can fib. After all, there’s a long list of problems I have with myself to throw at them.

Part of my issue with official, capital-R Resolutions is because, when I inevitably fail to keep them, I feel as if I am not resolute. Resolute is such a powerful word, one with connotations of bravery and loyalty. There are aspects of my life where I feel I am resolute (not those related to my health, either physiological or financial); areas where I feel I can make a difference, improve my life and that of those around me. But if there are Resolutions where I fail again and again, where I cannot seem to grow and learn, where I’ve failed hours into them, that’s different. A shower plan derailed isn’t an indictment of character, not the way breaking a Resolution is.

In reading stories, characters often make Resolutions. In the most fairy tale sense, this will be at the end of the story, once the character has officially learned their lesson, had their comeuppance, or saved the day by remembering some Poor Richardesque aphorism they had previously discounted. There’s nothing wrong with this formula; on the contrary, it goes back to the very beginning of storytelling; it transcends cultures and language and thousands of years. I love a story where the hero wins because they learned a lesson and changed, whereas the villain ignored that same lesson and fell apart.

I mention this long history because I’ve become fascinated lately with stories where the hero learns a lesson and then ignores it. Fails. Backslides. Maybe they bring themselves together in the third act; preferably not. Life rarely works out as neatly as that. People don’t always come to stories for realism: they want to see the good hero win; they want to believe that, in the end, they can change too. That whatever it is they want, they can achieve it.

There’s nothing wrong with aspiring to be bigger and better. There’s also nothing wrong with admitting that, despite our better angels, change is hard. The status quo has an inertia and it drags us all, real people or fictional alike, forward. People have a hard time changing for the same reason that few things ever end with a nice, tied-up resolution. Any sane editor would look at a person’s life and scream at the loose ends, the emotional dissonance, the utter chaos of it all.

We shouldn’t always try to live in a story, and by the same token, we shouldn’t try always to write real life. Fiction should shine a mirror on all of us, not just our failures and our contrition, but also our ambitions and our hopes.

Maybe this year I will make that my Resolution.