Jan 1 2021 - Who Chewed My Resolutions?

 

Resolution has gone far beyond its meaning - a firm decision to do or not do something.  In the context of the New Year, it is a promise to do better.  Not just differently as Merriam-Webster says, but towards improvement of the body or mind.  In the past, it was improvement of the soul. We can blame the Babylonians for this practice - that's 4,000 years ago.  Of course it has religious origins.  The Babylonians were negotiating with their gods at the new year which started in March.  Would it be easier to keep resolutions if we made them in March?  The Babylonians idea of resolution was what we would call completion - settling debts and returning things that weren't theirs.  They wanted to be rewarded with good fortune by the gods for the upcoming year.   And when did we acknowledge historically that we failed to keep these promises?  By 1802, when a magazine wrote a series of joke resolutions.  And shockingly, I have found them HERE and give you the page from Walker's Hibernian Magazine, in February 1802.  It is most rewarding to find a scanned book from a public library on the internet, rather than some social media rants.  I had thought decades ago - that we would be doing real research on the internet.  Got that one wrong. As compared to the past when new year's resolutions were religious activities, they are now secular.  The top resolutionS are to lose weight, eat healthier, lose weight, save money, learn new skill, travel more, etc, etc.  Blah, bah... It is no wonder satire set in quickly.   We have endearingly continued this satiric tradition, and there are now many options for our New Year's Resolution Satiric Entry.  Here's the one I have chosen:     You might want to see what our most popular cartoonists have to say.  Here's Dilbert and the New Yorker Magazine.    This picture comes from 2009, on Broadview Avenue during a photo walk about in Toronto.  It seems perfect for the beginning of a new year.   Purchase at: FAA - marilyncornwellart.com Redbubble - marilyncornwellart.ca

Movement Onwards to Resolutions

Of course we make New Year's Resolutions - consciously and unconsciously. Why do I think we do this?  We inhabit a constantly turning earth at 460 metres per second (that's 1,000 miles an hour).  Then it is travelling around the sun at 30 kilometres per second or 67,000 miles per hour.  The sun is orbiting - and at what speed?  At 200 - 220 km/second. Don't forget the galaxy.  All that mass means that everything is moving, drifting and flowing in the direction of the greatest gravitational attraction. Not only our galaxy, but all the nearby galaxies are going to experience a bulk flow due to gravitational force.  Everywhere we look in space we see the 2.725 K radiation background that's left over from the Big Bang.  And with analysis of that, we know that we are moving through space.  We're going somewhere. So make those New Year's Resolutions to move forward with your life - be at one with a moving existence. Don't let the internet drag you down with the stories of failure in just 17 days, or statistics of an 80 percent failure rate.  Perhaps popular Resolutions aren't for you. But what about the rest? I went searching and came up with two funny ones.  From Good Housekeeping:  Become a plant owner.  From the New York Times:  Clean your phone!  It's filthy! Do you wonder if someone made a New Year's Resolution to do something in order to get in the Guinness World Records?  James C. Rees has the record for the longest ownership of a vehicle from new - 61 years, 7 months and 4 days.  Did James decide on Friday May 23rd 1958 that he would own this car as his 'forever car'? I found a site to calculate the day of decision. Who can guess what New Year's Resolutions were made at Nelles Manor in Grimsby in the 1800s.  We don't seem to have kept any record of New Year's Resolutions through the ages. Here are two of the actors from the summer re-enactment event at Nelles Manor.

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The Resolution Journey is a Short One

We do live in a fast-paced world.  We need to take a look at New Year's Resolutions before they are stale-dated.  And that is very soon.  I wonder if there is something new on the horizon.  Last year we found out that it takes only 6 weeks for 80% of New Year's resolutions to fail.  

Historically we trace New Year's resolutions to the Babylonians and Romans. Wikipedia says that a quarter of American adults made resolutions at the end of the Great Depression. Polls showed that 40 - 50% of Americans made resolutions by the end of the 1990's.  They also show that New Year's resolutions are more likely to succeed than decisions made at other times of the year.  

What about New Year's resolutions of the famous? Jonathan Swift, Susan Sontag, Marilyn Monroe and Woody Guthrie penned New year's resolutions.  They are at brainpickings.org.

On the sublime side, Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist, lecturer, philosopher, and poet who led the transcendentalist movement in the mid-19th century wrote:

“Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year.”

And to book-end that on the satirical humour side, I found this on cbc.ca:

"This year, I will write War and Peace." - J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954

"Tolkien took almost the entire year to write War and Peace, keeping it a secret from his publisher. Upon submitting his completed masterpiece to the publisher and being told that War and Peace had already been written by Leo Tolstoy as far back as 1867, Tolkien burned the book (which had turned out identically to the original Russian work but with more elves) and wrote The Lord of the Rings in the year's five remaining days."  (This was by Jeremy Woodcock)

The lists of resolutions grow longer and more lofty every year - it used to be the top 10, it has grown to the 35 best, and even 100 resolutions that will inspire you.

What can we look forward to on resolutions? The stale-date is January 17th - 'Ditch Your Resolution Day'.  That seems to be shorter than a vacation.

We see Niagara Falls on January 1st - Resolution Day.
 

 

It's New Years All Day Long...Somewhere

The New Year's Eve of our lifetime occurred in the year 2000.  We likely all remember the celebration that year, and enjoyed fireworks from around the world.  Of course, we think of Sydney with its spectacular opera house and bridge.  There's a live feed at the Guardian with greetings from each country as it heads into 2019.  You can check out the feed HERE. Fireworks are underway in Sydney where the time is 10:39pm.  Samoa and Christmas Island are the first places on the planet to enter into 2019.  Chatham Islands, New Zealand has joined them, and shortly a small part of Russia will be there at 7:00am our time.    The New Year finally ends Tuesday at 7:00am when US Minor Outlying Islands - Baker & Howland Islands bring in the new year.  Samoa and American Samoa are a day apart in time with only 64 km of ocean distance between them.  At the Guardian feed, New Year's Resolutions are flowing in, and a month by month look ahead is included.  Canada has its own entry in October - we have Canadian elections. You can read the fast-forward of 2019 HERE.  And what about resolutions   There's a chart of what American's think Trump's resolutions should be - at the top of the list 22.8% of respondents think he should resign, 10.4% think he should tweet less, and so on. In keeping with these woefully out of touch resolutions of what Trump would consider doing, I found a series of  sad and useless resolutions from the creative and funny sadanduseless.com website: 1. Take a walk every day or at least briefly consider it 2. Don't spend too much time wearing pants 3. Maybe gain 5 lbs 4. Take every disappointment as a reason to give up 5.  Don't let anything get in the way of eating an entire pint of ice cream in one sitting 6. Something something saving money 7. Stop being afraid of what could go wrong and just focus on butts 8. This year I will live up to my full potent..oh look a shiny object 9. Don't waste time learning 10. Spend time doing what really matters:  watching Netflix 11. Forget a foreign language you only vaguely learned in high school 12. Read more book...takeout menus 13. See the world through the magic of internet 14. Maybe try to be nicer to other people but only if you feel like it 15. Hold someone's hand at sunset... just kidding, that's dumb 16. Avoid adulthood by spending more money on videogames 17. Forget past mistakes and press on to greater mistakes 18. Stop making resolutions, just get out there and start eating cheese This is a funny website - you can check out another of their posts of a Dad who turns his 6-year-old son's drawings into reality  - HERE. These are line drawings that are then turned into hilarious photo images. I've included the first one to encourage you to jump over - they are all very funny and make up for the useless resolutions. Have a Happy New Year's Celebration!

Our Marshmallow Year

Welcome to the New Year. We celebrate endings and beginnings and things fresh and new.  We make resolutions for new beginnings. So it is time to consider our resolve, according to PBS last night.  They pointed to the landmark study  - the Stanford marshmallow experiment.  It was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University. In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward provided immediately or two small rewards if they waited for a short period, approximately 15 minutes, during which the tester left the room and then returned. In follow-up studies, the researchers found that children who were able to wait longer for the preferred rewards tended to have better life outcomes, as measured by SAT scores, educational attainment body mass index, and other life measures. It has been repeated over and over again as the decades passed.  Here's a video of that 15 minutes for a number of the tiny participants. So our ability to make and not break our New Year's Resolutions is symbolized in a marshmallow.  It would be wonderful to have a marshmallow at the New Year's table each year:  but there is no association of marshmallows with New Year's. However, National Toasted Marshmallow Day is August 30th - so maybe that's when the resolutions that failed can become 'toast'.

Resolutions

This is the day when we wish each other all the best for the new year ahead.  

It is the day when improvement goals are set in our North American culture.  New Year's Resolutions are a secular tradition, but an ancient one. The Babylonians made promises to return borrowed objects and pay their debts. There seems to be lots of advice from everyone including Harvard economists on the best goals and how to achieve them.  This is followed by all sorts of studies that show that things don't actually turn out.

May your goals and dreams for 2015 all be fulfilled.