Anti-reflections on New Year’s Day

January 1, new beginning, blah, blah, blah.  I’m not feeling very profound today.

Or maybe I am.  Depends on your perspective, I guess.  The mood I am not in is one in which I self-flagellate for three or four paragraphs on all of the heinous mistakes I made in 2011, then make grandiose pronouncements of wholesale changes in the way I live my life.

What I am going to do is try to fully appreciate the power of the small correct decision.  What does that mean?  Dig:

I’m six months into successfully quitting smoking.  By successful, I mean 100% compliance, without a single slip.  It feels like I’m going to make it, but I’m not so foolish as to announce I have made it, because I’ve been this far down this road before.

The secret, I believe, is the avoidance of the past tense.  I think that for most nicotine addicts, the addiction is out there forever.  It doesn’t necessarily stay ready to pounce continuously, but it keeps an eye on you.  I know from experience it can be sitting on your chest very quickly, and you don’t see it coming until you can’t breathe from the weight.

So what do you do about it?  Well, whether you’re hitting a moment of unexpected weakness six months in, or you’re dealing with one of the eight or ten acute daily cravings right after you’ve stopped, you don’t say you’re never going to smoke again.  Rather, you say you’re not going to smoke for the next five minutes, because hey, you can abstain for five minutes, right?  Thing is, that five minutes tends to get strung together with other five minuteses.  So they build into hours, and hours build into days, and days build into you’ve accomplished your goal.  (Or, rather, you’re accomplishing your goal.)

I started considering what that kind of thinking might do for other areas of my life.  After all, I think most of what I’d like to change about my life also involve errors of consumption.  Shouldn’t have eaten that.  Why did I buy that last week?  So maybe you don’t announce that you’re changing your diet forever, or you’re going to be more careful with your money.  Maybe instead you make a good decision right now.  Then, you make another one.  Then, you make another one.  Drop the ball?  Don’t worry; you’ve got another opportunity to decide well coming up.

How about loving your spouse?  Do you just carry forward a baseline level of love for him/her, and today’s another day, so there it is?  Or do you reinvigorate it with regular injections of positive attention?  Guess which approach I’ve consistently observed in long, successful marriages?

I think meaningful forevers accumulate.

Happy New Year.

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