Planning, Preparation, Ease, Joy, and Grace
How to cultivate more successful resolutions for the New Year and beyond.
I am not going to start this by saying, “I’m not much of a resolution person,” because that would simply not be true. I have always loved New Year’s resolutions. And I’m excited to share with y’all what I’m hoping to bring into 2025. Before I share my New Year’s intentions and resolutions, though, I want to share a bit about how I approach these sticky cultural rituals. I love the idea of trying to better myself, and setting the bar just high enough to be a real challenge. Have I always been successful? God, no. And the weight of the many failures have lead to me to shift the way I work with the energy around New Year’s.
I do believe it’s valuable to make use of the collective energy around New Year’s. As a culture we are looking back to inspect and looking forward with hope, and it’s rare that our culture is collectively doing something that has the potential to be so positive. Of course, like most things, it’s not the what but the how that tends to get us in trouble.
Our culture sets a high bar and then demands we bootstrap ourselves up to it, which rarely works. If this approach has worked for you, remember, even a broken clock is right twice a day. The approach I’ve found to be most helpful isn’t the flashy, quit cold-turkey, discipline laiden, stick-to-it-ative mess I used when I was younger. It’s slower, gentler, and, honestly, pretty boring. In the last couple of years, my New Year’s resolutions have taken nearly a year or more to plan, and sometimes months to fully execute.
I see January 1 as the perfect time to shift my mindset, but give myself a lot of time and grace to allow that mindset to fully saturate my actions. For 2024, the two biggest things I wanted to change were choosing to ride my bike more, to the point I could feasibly get rid of my truck, and going vegan, and the way I’ve integrated these “resolutions” into my life are great examples of to cultivate not only successful resolutions, but also approach personal and spiritual growth any time of year.
The road to going car-free started all the way back in 2020 when I first started riding my bike for my health. I set the goal of being fit enough to ride the 12 miles from my house to the yoga studio I taught at twice a week (and back of course, 24 miles round trip), and asI achieved this milestone I slow started adding more. Once the obsession had been fully fanned by the bike-boom of the pandemic, bikes had started infiltrating every aspect of my life. It started with small trips to the coffee shop, but then I was testing to see where else I could get to in town. My truck would sit untouched for weeks on end. By the time I handed my keys back to the Toyota dealership I leased my truck from, the transition to car-free was almost effortless, just the most reasonable next step. Saying it was a resolution for 2024 is true, but it feels a little like cheating, knowing I had been planning and preparing myself for it for multiple years before hand.
The driver behind this shift was, at the core, joy. Yes, there are SO MANY wonderful reasons to go car-free and ride your bike more, but even if there weren’t, it wouldn’t matter to me because of how much joy I experience when I ride. This is the kind of joy that sustains any kind of effort towards a different life. Without it, all the amazing reasons in the world wouldn’t be enough to maintain the consistent effort required to be car-free in the heart of a car-centric state like Texas. As you reflect on your resolutions for this year, and any other personal or spiritual growth you hope to move into this year, I encourage you to find and follow the joy.
Maurice Nicoll, in his Commentaries on the Work on Gurdjieff and Ouspensky, says, “It is only through some kind of delight, some feeling of joy or pleasure or some genuine affection or desire, that a person can work and bring about any change of being in themself.” Without this lightness and joy, nothing in us can change.
And even with all the joy and great reasons and firm convictions, nothing changes overnight.
This is why we need to approach these changes with ease and grace. When my wife shared that she wanted to return to her vegan diet, I was happy to jump on board. Again, there are so many reasons I wanted to do this, but at the core I wanted to see my wife happy and healthy, and because our lives are so intertwined it was clear she wouldn’t be able to stick to it without me, and I certainly couldn’t even attempt to do it without her. Because this was such a huge challenge for me, I let myself ease in slowly and intentionally.
Way back in 2020, when I started riding my bike for my health, I also tried to cold-turkey all animal products, essentially forcing myself to veganism over night after getting some scary health news. Yes, I had some incredibly good reasons to make a shift to my diet, but the fear that gripped me demanded a kind of discipline and will-power I had no way of sustaining. And sure enough, once the pandemic hit and life was throw upside-down, my new healthy diet went right out the window.
This go around I wanted to do it differently. Danielle and I had been talking about it for months, and set January 1 as the start date. But I wasn’t committing to an overnight transformation. I started with something I knew I could do, cut out meat. We didn’t hardly any meat in the house when we cooked at home, so it was really only making adjustments to how I ate when I was eating out. I let myself continue with dairy products while I settled into this new change. Once it felt easy I knew it was time to add a little more. Soon, milk was cut out, and then I was ready to face the Final Boss: Cheese.
Giving up cheese wasn’t easy, but because I had eased slowly into the other changes, it felt more manageable. The joy I felt eating a plant-based diet had become so clear that giving up cheese didn’t feel like an inconvenience, it was simply the next reasonable step. It was clear, though, had I attempted to use the same iron-fist approach I used back in 2020, this wouldn’t have been possible. Now, eating a vegan diet is not only easy, but life-giving and enjoyable. With this, though, is also the grace and flexibility we offer ourselves within this new change.
Eating plant-based is our new normal, meaning, it’s the default, it’s what we do more often than not. AND we’re human, and we live in a culture that is heavily dependent on animal products as food. I don’t find it necessary to be militant about my diet. I don’t want to put people out when I’m offered food, and the grace that I offer myself here not only helps me to maintain the new normal, it also helps me to clarify my values around food. Food is connective, and while I won’t eat meat, I don’t want my diet to become the source of disconnection from my loved ones and community. Grace allows us to connect deeper and take deviations from the new-normal in stride.
As you get ready for the start of the New Year, don’t miss out on the energy of so many people choosing to improve their lives, but consider riding the wave in a new way. Infusing more planning and preparation, and finding more ease, joy, and grace for yourself will help to ensure that the changes you really want to see actually stick.
Support is also a huge part of maintaining the changes we want to see in our lives, feel free to share what you’re hoping to change in the new year and allow this to be a space where we can support each other in our growth and development. Thanks for reading along, it means so much. Please consider subscribing if you haven’t already, and send it over to someone you know who might enjoy the content. I wish you all a very happy New Year!
Happy New Year!