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Shedding Shoulds By Diana Holmstrom

By on January 21, 2014
winter resolution

By Diana Holmstrom.

I don’t know about you, but I’m done with the whole New Year’s Resolution thing.

The other day I was trying to research the origins of this tradition. I discovered that ancient Babylonians made promises to their gods each year that they would return borrowed objects and repay their debts.

Not much has changed.

Many of us look to January 1st as a re-do opportunity; new year, new objectives, new strategies. That makes sense, I suppose. I wonder, however: are we setting the same goals every year and, if we are, what does that say about our success rate in previous years?

For nearly two decades, one of my big resolutions has been, “Lose 30 pounds.”   This means that either I weighed about 700 pounds back then, and thought it wise to ease the weight off gently at a manageable rate of 30 pounds per year, OR I’ve spent the past two decades fighting the very same 30 pounds.

The word “resolution” sounds so tough, doesn’t it? So firm. So determined. Invincible. RE:SOLUTION. It reads like a stern memo, sent directly from the CEO of a Fortune 100 company.  Whatever solutions are demanded in that memo are to be achieved without question or argument.

On the other hand, “Re” is also a prefix. It means “once more”. “Afresh”. As in, “Re-do”. And this implies it didn’t get done the last time around.

Perhaps that is why, over time, I’ve begun to associate the word “Resolution” to the word “Resignation”!  Last year my New Year’s Resolution list again included ‘lose 30 pounds’. I didn’t lose them. In fact a few of their relatives moved in with them.

This year, therefore, I have decided not to treat January 1st as a magical transformation date, or a time when the Trinity of Fairies,  Motivation, Discipline, and Goal Achievement come visiting and sprinkle their dust over me on the eve of December 31, as I peacefully sleep into the new year.

Look, I know resolution-setting works for some. I can’t help thinking, however, that those folks probably set and achieve goals all year long anyway, For them, a New Year’s Resolution is just another daily task list, prioritized, color-coded, alphabetized, and (of course) completed. These are people who do not need fairies.

It’s the rest of us who need the boost, people who run at least five minutes late for everything, who make copious To Do lists every morning over a cup of hot coffee, feeling very smug and organized for having done so, but then misplace the list ten minutes later and waste half the morning looking for it. We are the people who can never find our keys, who wait until the last minute to put gas in the car, who would swear we put the receipt into our wallets before bringing our department store items back for a refund.   We end up paying for lost library books, holding up the grocery line because we don’t notice the four broken eggs in the carton until the check out clerk points it out and, in general, we find ourselves apologizing to others far too frequently.

Perhaps the question to ask is how to stop the unwanted patterns from repeating.

I read something recently in a self-help book. It suggested how much better we might feel if the word “should” were removed from our vocabulary. It connotes judgment. If we say or feel that we should do something, it implies we aren’t doing it and that we are wrong for not doing it.

The book said that often the should’s in our life are determinations we adopt because of what other people think we ought to be doing; that if we were to examine why we haven’t accomplished our should’s, we might realize that often the answer is because that particular thing wasn’t very important to us after all. Yet we feel….yes, here it comes….that it SHOULD be.

The book suggested we change  “should” to “choose”.  By choosing to lose weight, I am not creating a win or lose, succeed or fail outcome. I am instead selecting a gift item for myself, and that gift is better health.

I am conducting a little experiment during the month of January. I am redirecting my thoughts and words from “I should” to “I choose”. I am making choices throughout each day, perceiving what I’d like, and not attaching too much to the outcome. Staying in the moment a little more.I like this concept. It has gotten my year off to a different sort of start; one that is more pressure-free than previous years have been. One that reminds me to examine a bit more carefully what it is that I’d like to do for myself. Not because I have to. Not because others think I should. But simply because I choose to. Perhaps in this way I will discover that I am my very own Motivation Fairy.

I’ll let you know how it goes!

 

IMG_0295Diana Holmstrom‘s writing “career” began in the 3rd grade, through an act of deception. A vexing homework assignment, in which she had to write a two page poem describing the color silver, left her frustrated and in tears after the forth line. Inspiration was not coming. Exhausted, she finally went to bed, assignment incomplete. When she awakened the next morning and went down for her breakfast, she discovered a piece of paper beside her plate. Written on it was a lovely, completed poem entitled, “What Is Silver?” Her father had taken pity on her and completed it the evening before. She turned in the assignment and was the celebrity of the school for the next week. Teachers were impressed, the poem was put into the school magazine. It took very little time for Diana to mostly forget that she was not the author of anything more than the first four lines of that poem! Interestingly, she never again had the slightest difficulty writing poems, stories, or anything else. She was a writer. At the time, she didn’t realize the wonderful and amazing lesson she had learned: that our beliefs create our reality. ”Writing, for me, is a way to make a connection; a connection between myself and that which is beyond myself, to serve as evidence that we don’t stand in solitary confinement as we so often think we do. We are all connected. Though our thoughts may differ, our feelings are affirmation that we are not isolated beings.”

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