Clodagh Finn: Down with New Year's resolutions — we need something gentler now

We have a real chance to shape a new and more equitable world. Let’s hope we grab it with both hands, writes Clodagh Finn

Dr Joseph Varon comforts a patient in the Covid-19 intensive care unit at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas. Picture: Go Nakamura/Getty Images

It is surprising how much Twixmas resembles lockdown. The twilight netherworld between Christmas and New Year feels like level 5 to the power of two, only with better pyjamas thanks to the recent festive gift tied up with bows under the tree.

They are proving to be the ideal apparel for these days of guilt-free sloth. Here’s hoping, at least, that you have managed to suspend guilt in this gentle, time-warped hiatus between the excess of Christmas and the starkness of January, because it will rush back with an unexpected force once we ring in the new year.

It remains to be seen, though, just how we might do that. Restrictions aside, New Year’s Eve is the ultimate marker of the passage of time and that will be hard to do in a year when time itself has been so curiously bent out of shape. The feeling of falling down the rabbit hole used to be confined to these few gloriously aimless days in late December, but that sense of disorientation came to define most of 2020.

Everything was upended by Covid-19. So much so that, for a while, there was even talk of cancelling Christmas. It couldn’t be done, of course, just as we will not be able to cancel New Year’s Eve. The new year will dawn and, with it, new hope: the first vaccinations were administered in Ireland yesterday.

That is not to say we should herald in this new year like the ones that have gone before. We may not be able to call off New Year’s celebrations — no matter how restricted — but there is a solid argument to be made to silence the annual call to make New Year's resolutions.

Down with them, I say. And down with that goading phrase ‘New Year, New You’, which urges us to cast off the old and embrace the new, and to do so in the bitter cold light of January.

In recent years, another hateful phrase has taken hold — the exhortation to aim to be your ‘best self’. 

It is admirable, of course, but in these challenging days it is often taxing enough just to be your ordinary, everyday self.

And it is not the time for that everyday self to swear off the things that have offered a sliver of comfort over this challenging Christmas. We have had enough of restrictions, deprivations, and guidelines. This is not the moment to add more or to tell us to tighten our belts, so to speak, because losing weight is always top of the resolution rankings.

Operation transformation can wait. So too can the strict or punishing regimes. Don’t throw out the leftover boxes of chocolates if a shot of sweetness brings some joy. Resolving not to put the empty wrappers back in the box is a perfectly acceptable New Year’s resolution in itself.

Remember, too, that most resolutions fail. As sure as New Year’s follows Twixmas, there will be a spate of dispiriting articles in early spring telling us that 80% — or some equally deflating high number — of our resolve has dissipated by the second week of February.

As we know only too well, willpower is finite in the human body and, if you are dipping into its exhaustible well, it may run out before you reach the 66 days — or whatever this year’s estimate will be — to form a lasting and automatic habit.

Don’t get me wrong. To those who succeed, I salute you. I have real admiration for the people who pound the pavements in early January or take daily dips in the winter sea or give up alcohol or sign up for Veganuary. Go for it and be proud.

For those of us who fall off the wagon or, indeed, fail to even muster the strength to get on it, remember that we are living through a global pandemic. The finishing line is not yet in sight and, even though the coming days are infused with hope, we still have only part of the picture.

Even the experts can’t answer all the questions and it will take some time to survey the wreckage of a pandemic that has taken lives, damaged health — physical and mental — and destroyed so many livelihoods.

The time for hunkering down has not yet passed. As John O’Donohue put it in one of the poems of the pandemic: “This is the time to be slow/ Lie low to the wall/ Until the bitter weather passes.”

And it will pass. There is no burden that does not eventually unclasp. History, if we look to it, tells us that.

In the meantime, why not resolve to nurture the tendrils of something that showed itself in myriad forms throughout the last difficult year — solidarity. 

“Anyone can be destructive, but the capacity to build something will go on being the great human surprise,” the late Clive James wrote in another context, but it seems to me to be a fitting quote to pin to the calendar when it turns into 2021.

Over the last year, we have seen the great human surprise of our shared humanity and how it has helped us to pick a path through the horror of a global pandemic affecting billions.

If there is one picture to sum up the power of human connection, it is the photograph of an American doctor comforting a distressed patient who wanted to be with his wife on Thanksgiving Day. The doctor was later named as Dr Joseph Varon, a man working his 252nd consecutive day at the United Memorial Medical Center in Houston, Texas, when the shot was taken.

It was later reported that the patient did get to return to his wife — a happy outcome for once.

There have been so many unhappy outcomes, yet they have been somewhat tempered by the collective efforts to build rather than knock this year. We have re-imagined our lives in so many positive ways, making our cities more human, reconnecting with our localities, and rediscovering the joy in small things.

The gaping hole left by the loss of live music and live theatre reminds us how important those things are to the human spirit.

But what strikes me most about the year almost gone is that we might finally have realised that we are, indeed, all one. The universality of the experience everyone on this earth is living through at this moment has never been more palpable.

We have a real chance now to shape a new and more equitable world. Let’s hope we grab it with both hands and are not tempted to run back to the old ways when all this is over.

Given all that is at stake, then, it really is not the time to fret about a Christmas-bloated waistline. If the wobble continues to demand attention, here’s a neat solution. When the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, set your weighing scales back by four kilos and pad gently into the new year.