New Year, New Me

As a dedicated gym rat for over 20 years, I have gotten used to the same pattern happening every January: for the first few weeks of the new year, the gym is packed with people who made New Year’s resolutions to get in shape: people crowding around all the equipment (especially the water fountains), desperately trying to make it look like they know what they are doing, all the while leaving pools of sweat on everything they touch. By around the middle of February, though, most of these folks have figured out that this is hard work, and taking a day off to recover turns into taking three or four days off, and the crowd thins back out to its usual size. Gym owners everywhere love the new year because so many people buy memberships and never walk through the door again. They like the IDEA of getting in shape more than they like what it actually takes to get there.

The same things happen in all the usual areas of our lives: fitness, school, keeping up with friends, volunteering, keeping up with our spiritual lives. In particular, the first 9pm Mass each year is crammed to the gills – of course, we do have ice cream afterwards, so maybe that’s our fault – but I think that even going to church more regularly can be a hard pattern to form. Once a week is too infrequent to really ingrain the habit of setting time and space aside to refocus our lives. That doesn’t mean I am saying NOT to go to church, just that if the real goal is to be more mindful or to stay alert to the presence and action of God in our day-to-day lives, one hour once a week just won’t cut it any more than going to the gym once a week for an hour will make any substantial difference in your physical well-being.

I participate in a meditation group in town, and today the leader invited us to tie strings around our wrists in recognition of the new year. The strings stay there until they fall off in a few months, but in the meantime, those strings are long enough and in the way enough that a few times a day they bring us back to what we told ourselves we want to do differently this year. There’s the thing – becoming a new you is not a sprint. It’s a slow and steady articulation of reminders and pushing against ingrained habits and falling into old patterns and trying again.

If, like me, you take New Year’s resolutions with a serious grain of salt but you would like to make some changes in your life, try making a commitment to something simple, regular, and easily attainable. Do a quick exercise routine in your room or your apartment each morning so that you have at least done a few minutes of exercise per day. Commit to writing one email each day to someone you don’t connect with as often as you like. Download an app to make your phone beep every couple of hours, and each time it does, take a few minutes of mindful breathing.  Better yet, ask a friend to join you and hold one another accountable. Forming good habits is a challenge, which is why so many of us try and fail each year, but we can make small and lasting routines into the stuff of a new me, a new you, a new us.

Patrick Cousins is a member of the Department of Campus Ministry.