How are we doing on our New Year's resolutions? Maybe it seems like it's a little early to ask, but a 2015 poll by the Marist College found that one month into the new year, about a third of people who made New Year's resolutions had stopped their efforts to lose weight, decrease spending and become better people. Six months into the year, the faithful resolutioners had dropped by more than half. So that's why I'm asking how we're doing in the middle of January. It seems like it's the safest time to ask.
I made a few resolutions myself, everything from write a novel and read the classics to stretch in the mornings and wear more sunscreen. I've actually been doing OK on the sunscreen one, but I've been less successful getting to the others. I'm telling myself that I need an adjustment period before I launch into better health and personal improvement. If I start too fast, I might hurt myself. So I am going to start writing the first chapter of my novel. I'm just going to do it tomorrow.
How do we end up failing to keep resolutions? And I don't just mean New Year's resolutions. Efforts to be better might sound a little louder on the first of January, but they should also sound familiar. We tell ourselves: I should walk more. I'll save gas and get exercise. Or, I should eat less junk food. I should leave the house earlier or more often. Or I shouldn't get so frustrated with things. I should try to see things from another perspective.
I believe that there are a couple of reasons why our resolutions to be better fail. One, which I think New Year's resolutions in particular are prone to, is the idea that we are still the same old people. For example, suppose I resolved to eat less sugar in the new year. At first, I'd cut out sodas and pastries, everything added and artificial and sweet. I'd be a genuine abstainer.
But then, I might be in a hurry one morning, and I would swap my regular breakfast of black coffee and a hard-boiled egg for a powdered sugar doughnut. But I'd tell myself, it's OK. It's just once. Then later, I'm at dinner party, and someone offers me dessert. And I would tell myself it was OK, it would be rude not to accept. The next thing you know, I'm hiding bags of jelly beans in laundry hampers. But that would be OK too, because those are there for hard days, and I've got it under control.
And then, when I've had a really hard day, I'd happen to see a cake on sale at the supermarket, and that will be it. I'd buy the cake, bring it home and sit down in front of it with a knife and fork. But even then, it would still be OK. Why? Because I'd tell myself that I'm no different now than I was last year. I'm still that guy, I've always been that guy, that cake-eating guy. That's just who I am. And then, I'd eat the cake.
There is truth to that. If I was that cake eating guy, I will have always had been that cake eating guy. I could change my ways, move to a new state and grow a mustache, but all that cake I ate will still have been eaten by me. And that can be demoralizing. If we start to think of our pasts as sticky, we are bound to get stuck. That's called falling back into bad habits.
It's somewhat comical when it's about cake, but it's less so when someone decides they just are that person who drinks too much or that person who loses their temper. That's when you don't just fall into bad habits—you can fall and hurt yourself and the people around you.
What can we do to avoid doing that? I stumbled upon a biblical suggestion. I say that I stumbled upon it because it comes from a passage that we don't typically associate with self-improvement.
In the sixth chapter of the gospel of Mark, Jesus instructed his disciples on their mission. The passage reads: “He said to them, 'Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them.' So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent.”
That passage is rightly understood to be Jesus' instructions for how his disciples should to conduct themselves in public—from how to heal to the clothes they should wear—which gives us a peek inside the workings of the early Christian church. But it's also clear that Jesus was speaking somewhat symbolically.
Shaking dust from one's feet was about more than personal hygiene. Religious scholars interpret it as responding to a host's hospitality, or lack thereof, but it has always been interpreted in the abstract—less about the dust itself and more about what it meant metaphorically.
So what happens when we apply that abstraction to ourselves? Can we shake our own dust from our own feet? How do we respond to the people we were in the past who were bad hosts, bad stewards of our spiritual selves? How do we respond to the people we were who were ignorant, who lacked control, who hurt more than they helped?
We do what Jesus told all his disciples to do. We stay as long as we need to in their presence, and then we shake their dust from our feet and leave. The people we were in the past will refuse to hear us—they cannot hear us—but we can hear them. We can learn from them, we can learn to be better than we once were, and then we can release the people we were and embrace the people we are to become.
Jesus was instructing his disciples to exist within the moment they existed, to stay in that place until they left. It was a call to be present, a call to be mindful, and it was a call to not remain in that place once they were no longer needed or in need, once they were no longer there.
But maybe we're having trouble getting started—maybe we're having trouble leaving that place and leaving behind that person. That's the other big problem with New Year's resolutions, especially if we're caught up in who we were. How can we release the old and then embrace the new? How can we begin being different? How can we begin being better?
That ancient Chinese saying about how the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step actually is an ancient Chinese saying. It comes from the Tao Te Ching, the collection of Taoist wisdom attributed to Lao Tsu, and my favorite rendition of it comes from the translation by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English. It reads: “A journey of a thousand miles starts under one's feet.”
That's my favorite translation because I like that image—the journey that begins under one's feet. I like it because it indicates the journeyer is already on the journey because they are already on the road. It's under their feet.
Religion, a spiritual practice, offers us a number of tools that help us move toward our goals of personal improvement: moral guidelines to help us treat other people better; metaphysical focus to help us see what really matters; positive rituals to give us the discipline to replace old habits. But those tools cannot put us on the path to personal improvement because we're already there.
We're already on the path. We're on the path to being different. We're on the path to being better. Our journeys have already started. They started under our feet, under our sandals, while we were looking somewhere else. So we don't have to force ourselves to begin because we've already begun. All we have to do is to keep moving forward.