Edel Coffey: My New Year's Resolution is to protect my work-life balance

Picture: Bríd O'Donovan

As 2024 rushes towards us at high speed, have you curated your selection of highlights of the year to paste on social media? 

Do they represent just the right amount of modesty and bad times to offset the dazzling good fortune and success? 

Or have you already scrolled through hundreds of images and have yet to find a single moment you want to commemorate on the grid?

It’s a funny time of year, New Year’s Eve. The disappointments and failures of the past year are fresh in our minds as we reacquaint ourselves with unfulfilled New Year’s resolutions and other people’s highlights.

It’s easy to make a year look good on social media when a select few moments are plucked out of the swamp of days and weeks and months, polished up to a high shine and set out like diamonds on a black felt backdrop so it looks like your whole life might be made up of such moments.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually done one of these end-of-year posts but I know I have attempted to several times and usually given up halfway through, either because my year has been too desultory to continue or because I feel like a giant narcissist highlighting all of the wonderful bits of my year. 

It’s good to be grateful for the year that has passed but it’s also good to remember that these end-of-year highlights are not representative of anybody’s actual life. 

It’s certainly not something that should influence anyone’s self-worth as they look back on the year that has been.

The fact is, some years are filled with huge moments, things like marriages or divorces, births and deaths, the big once-in-a-lifetime events. 

Other years are flashy and bold, with big explosive yields in the areas of career or love. 

In the harsh glare of other people’s end-of-year highlights, it’s easy to forget that some years are just quiet, uneventful years.

I was reminded of this when I came across a post on the writer Hazel Gaynor’s Instagram account, featuring John O’Donoghue’s poem ‘A Blessing for the Breakup of a Relationship.’ 

‘This is the time to be slow/Lie low to the wall/Until the bitter weather passes,’ O’Donoghue wrote. Gaynor pointed out that these words were equally applicable to these end-of-year round-ups trumpeting all of the successes of the past year. 

They struck me as deeply wise and comforting words, the kind of comfort or shelter that a parent might offer against disappointments.

Later in his poem, O’Donoghue went on: ‘If you remain generous,/Time will come good;/And you will find your feet/Again on pastures of promise,/Where the air will be kind/And blushed with beginning.’ It has the ring of truth. 

There are highs and lows in every year, in every decade, in every life. We all have fallow years, years where seedlings burrow deep in the soil and take hold, years where not much seems to be happening above ground at all. We all need fallow years. 

Ovid knew as much when he wrote: ‘a rested field yields a beautiful crop.’ It’s worth remembering today that life moves in cycles. Some of us might be in our big flashy news cycle, posting our highlights in a frenzy, wondering which ones to leave out because we have so many. 

Others of us might be in our underground phase, a bulb in the dark ground doing the preparatory work that will see us bloom eventually. 

Keeping this in mind in the face of end-of-year highlight posts can help keep us generous in the knowledge that there are lots of new beginnings ahead for all of us.

I’m not really doing resolutions this year. If I have anything resembling a resolution, it is the goal to protect my work-life balance as much as I can. 

Instead of resolutions, this year I’m trying something different. This year I’m attempting to see the new year as connected to each preceding year of my life, rather than an individual and finite measure of success or failure over a period of twelve months. 

As I get older, my retrospective vision reaches further, and I realise that no year, even the least fruitful, is ever lost or wasted. Even the slowest year will have led us somewhere and given us something to build upon. 

And so I am attempting to see each new year as building on the previous year. Instead of starting afresh with all sorts of grand ambitions and good intentions, I am thinking, instead, of adding on a little each year (not least because that feels much more manageable and less daunting than starting afresh). 

I always think of one of Samuel Beckett’s most famous quotes ‘fail again, fail better’ at this time of year. 

We need not have huge ambitions as we enter January 1, nor need we feel any shame or failure if last year bore nothing grid-worthy. 

Rather just a willingness to try again, and possibly fail again, in our goals and dreams. 

And if we happen to succeed, hopefully we’ll be forgiven for including our success in our end-of-year highlights reels.