20/20-A new decade is upon us
Chicago, what in the God damned hell? It seems like only yesterday we tossed the rotting corpse of 2018 into the incinerator and wept under the falling ash and now 2019 is on its last few beeps of life support and I’ve got one hand on the plug. I find it hard to believe that some higher power hasn’t smote us into oblivion for our bad choices and narcissism or that we haven’t yet blown up the entire planet with our need for efficiency. And yet here we are about to jump and/or be pushed off the cliff into another span of days with horrors (and perhaps joys!) unknown.
On December 31st as we all stand around in a room filled with half full cocktail cups and partially deflated mylar balloons, we ooze with anticipation of crawling out of the birth canal of 2019 and landing, squalling and filled with so much potential, onto January 1st. As the sun rises on January 1 we will suddenly become all of the things that we just couldn’t manage to work at in the previous 365 odd days. As the day turns from Tuesday into glorious Wednesday we will all be bursting at the seams with plans, ideas and goals surely to be bested in no time as we’ve suddenly become brand new people in the middle of frigid ass winter at the dead end of the holiday season. What I’m saying is fuck a resolution-new year, same old me! NYE indicates that there are things about me that I need to take stock of that just aren’t good enough and frankly I’m fucking insulted (but not really, I’m gross).
Last year I let myself be seduced by the idea of resolve and jumped up on my metaphorical soap box, finger aloft, and declared that we all needed some fresh perspective. I RESOLUTIONED to look at things in a new light because perception is reality. I made a hot new Instagram account dedicated to the idea of perspective and instantly got a whole 0 new followers because social media is boring and I am boring and wow pretending that you have perspective (especially when you don’t have it) is terribly boring. And then the usual happened new year same old mistakes etc. etc. I did cry a bit less in 2019 than I did in the previous 2 years.
Although it did help to remind myself to look at things differently it was easy to let myself NOT look at things differently and continue to skew every but of minutiae into a tragedy or heartbreak. And though I resolved to try and change my perspective there was nothing holding me to that, no action item that I could point to to say that I had done it. I could do it or not do it and if you know me you know how much I love not doing things OR how much I love to continue to do things in the exact same way (I’d eat buffalo chicken every day of my life if I could (but why can’t I?)).
What ties my disdain for resolutions, my own and generally speaking, all together is a lack of accountability. Resolutions are expected to be broken, I expect myself to fail and willing let myself do so, all under the guise of things being too hard or allowing oneself to have a break. The status quo is a comfortable couch under a warm blanket and change and/or trying is standing outside in the cold under a flat grey sky-the first one is what most of us want to do everyday and the second sounds obscure and kind of sad and awful. We don’t want to do anything that threatens the possibility of sadness or awfulness.
After all this hemming and hawing the bottom line is this: there is a lack of follow through. I hate resolutions because they rarely produce results. I hate making resolutions for myself because I know that following through is something I often don’t do-I love the comfortable couch of sameness year after year. But here in the crusty eyed beginning of a new decade it no longer serves to look at things differently or speak out loud (or behind the shroud of the Internet at large) and then do nothing at all to move into the spaces we’ve created. In this new decade it’s time to take up the weight of our resolve and carry it (or drag it) across the line in the sand that is our collective inability to actually DO A THING.
TL:DR, it’s time to say goodbye to the grey area in 2020. It’s time to say goodbye to the vagaries and the bullshit and the things that are fun to talk about and the setting a date in the future to relieve ourselves of the burden of making a choice. It’s time to stop saying we’ll do something and then just not doing it. It’s time to not just talk about it but to be about it. It’s time to be the needle pulling the thread all the way through to close the gaping hole. When you follow something from the beginning all the way to the end there are no pieces left out to get caught on something leaving you with the potential of unraveling. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as saying you’ll do something and then actually doing it-not that I would know…yet.
2020 is the year of the white metal rat in the Chinese zodiac and now it is the year of follow through in the hipster/millennial/reposting articles counts as doing something zodiac. It only took me 1 whole month to follow through on completing this so I think I’m off to an excellent start-what will you do?
