Taking the willpower out of New Year's resolutions

Appropriately enough, the year turns on the darkest day, the 21st of December. So the hope and resolution of January 1st have been ten days in the cooking. 

This year the darkest day was on a Wednesday, my usual day to review the progress, or otherwise, of my writing, and to write a ‘could do’ list for the week ahead. So that day I sat quietly with A and the children in the Red Room, warmed by the smokeless fuel fire and the added warmth of belonging that comes from us being together, to review the whole year and make plans for the next. And my diary turned out to be a list of the things that I meant to do but forgot. And the other things that I didn't plan but found myself doing over and over and over. Life is indeed what happens when you’re planning other things.

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Happy

I woke from a dream that I was talking to a guy I used to know in Florence. It being a dream he was also the blond man with a smile who invited me to his twenty-first birthday party in Hertfordshire after only knowing me for a few days on a ski holiday. In the dream we are at a grand party, standing beside a stone barricade champagne in hand, looking down at a fast-flowing river.

‘Do you remember?’, I say, thinking of Florence, ‘Do you remember standing beside a stone barricade looking down at the river?’ Was he even there that day? I don’t remember.

‘You look so happy!’ This man who saw something in me decades ago likes what he’s seeing behind my face. ‘You really are happy!’ 

I pirouette and float down a waterfall into the underground palace of our mysterious host. 

At the beginning of the first Covid lockdown, afraid that our ninety-year old parents lives would end without them knowing we were grateful, my siblings and I set up a weekly family zoom call at teatime on Sundays. Imagine seven personalised screen boxes and the frozen not-quite-knowing-the-rules of my father who left work in the fax era. In the top left box my sister, as choatically bouncy as Animal the drummer from the Muppets, zingifies the space between us as she says,  ‘Dormouse!!! You are happy!!!!!.’ 

What made me happy

It’s only now I’ve had a course of antidepressants that actually worked that I can be sure I was clinically depressed for most of my life. It was like getting a colour television. (And yes it was overnight, that quick, and lasted for two years after). Before, the world was made in shades of ash. Afterwards it became clear how much greyness and rot I had been putting out there. Sure, after a while you get used to the colour picture and stop being consciously grateful for the improvement. But it’s there underneath all the time ready for you when you remember. The sunrise of gratitude for Catherine, the blessing of a young psychiatrist who once said, ‘OK, SSRIs don’t work for you. What do you want to try next?’ 

The tricyclics brought technicolour to the world a couple of days after the first dose increase and triggered my tachycardia so it wasn’t safe to take them any longer. This is the way life works, even when you’re not clinically depressed. Life is intrinsically disappointing if you expect it to have a happy ending.

I have coped with the greyness of my world by being stoical. In childhood I chose to stay on the sofa during Doctor Who when my sisters were crouched squealing behind it. I chose to look under the bed only once on arriving at the empty house in the dark. I sat, silent and invisible, when my father forgot to serve me Sunday lunch; when my mother forgot to pick me up from school. I didn’t complain about the things that happened at school and on the tube home. I didn’t make a fuss about the internal contradictions of so many adults or the terror and misunderstoodness of being a child. Making a fuss didn’t help anyway. Or perhaps my father’s ‘Now let’s not make an entirely unnecessary fuss’ had something to do with it.

As an older child I found logic was useful. I suppose you could say I discovered for myself the Stoicism of Marcus Aurelius. I found relief in telling myself the monsters were not real; that he was distracted; that she has other things on her mind; that it was better not to think about the things I couldn’t change. It helped a lot. It helped when my friend disappeared without explanation from one term to the next. It helped when I was wrongly accused of cheating in an exam. It helped when someone’s mother said I must be a gypsy because I didn’t brush my hair.

But there are limits. There were too many things I couldn’t change. And it didn’t stop me feeling feelings. Which was I think what I was hoping for. 

Feelings come up through my body in a wave that will drown me. Will drown me because I have no defence. I’ll be left gasping and spluttering, no longer able to pretend I am competent. When that happens the Stoicism is only useful later. When I was in therapy that was the choice I had - drowning or logic. I’m not sure what I got from therapy other than paying someone to listen to me. Ah, there it is, a wave of self-pity. Those waves of feeling can still drown out my ability to control myself. I fight them down, and they respond by demonstrating who’s really in charge.

The way of psychotherapy is to bring into consciousness the unconscious experiences that trigger the difficult feelings. Going to therapy I knew I was fatally flawed but at least I was doing something to fix myself. Exposing the archaeology of my distress helped me for a long time. But somehow knowing that my parents’ personalities and cultural mores were responsible for my neurotic disabilities didn’t help me overcome them. In fact it brought destructive anger and judgement of my parents for being incompletely whole. Something that hadn’t been a problem before. 

In the end it wasn’t therapy that changed me, it was the life experience of being responsible for myself and other people that showed me that my family’s behaviour towards me was simply not relevant. The personal reactions evaporated, leaving only the affection and blood tie that had always been underneath. For most of the time anyway.

When I knew I had cancer I expected that hard feelings would come so I decided to play the wild card and try daily meditation. The philosophy that goes with it is different from any I have explored before and irritatingly opaque. It’s one of those perspectives, like psychodynamic psychotherapy and Myers Briggs Personality Inventory, where you can only understand the philosophy when you have put in the work. 

I was lucky enough to find a teacher who is a down-to-earth sort of person who suggested I find out for myself. There was already the logic robot in my head telling me any religion is going to be irrational. I wouldn’t have persevered with someone who told me what to believe as well. But his practical guidance was that you won’t be good at mindfulness, but as you continue you will discover that good performance is not in fact the goal. And repeating the attempt at being mindful over and over and over is all that’s needed to change your life. Which I have found to be true.

The cosmic joke

At the Family Zoom Tea I tell Animal that the reason for the change is Buddhism, but there’s a Brazilian singer she wants to talk to us about. To stream a performance of one of his sambas for us. (She prepares these distractions and delights in advance.) So I never get to tell my family the simple power of repeated attempts at presence in the moment. 

My husband A prepares questions when he joins us. Kind and funny questions to trigger my mother’s memories of her early years. He doesn’t know we’ve had forty years of the same stories from her. Well, he does know but that doesn’t stop him trying to cheer her up. This is one of the things that mindfulness has shown me so very clearly - that other people don’t just see the same things differently, they see different things. They live in universes that are dictated by the natural tendencies of their own minds, and it’s quite funny how blind they are to that fact. We are all blind men trying to describe an elephant. 

Life as a social mammal is a running joke of predictable misunderstandings and hobby horses. We can see this predictable dissonance in other people as an attack of some kind, which destroys so many family Christmases, or we can accept our individual blindnesses as the truth of what human beings are and stop taking it so personally. We can start seeing the joke.

And of course I’m no exception. My own particular folly, no doubt including the desire to write this blog, is invisible to me. My particular flavour of unawareness is not something I need to correct, it’s the river I am fated to swim in. I have no choice, and that is how it should be. And it seems to be a lot easier to live knowing I have an unseeable blind spot and that makes me normal, than deluding myself that I’m fatally flawed and have to be correcting myself all the time just to be allowed in the water. What I most want to do is to stop trying so blooming hard to know everything as if that has ever actually worked for me.

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My intention for 2023

Reviewing the year behind me it became obvious that the plans I imposed with my will were more effective as baffles to a happy life than anything else. And that I was constructing stories to make it simpler. To make it look as if I made it happen. I don’t know about yours but the life that I'm living is too complicated to summarise. 

Thinking ahead and trying to plan, I see that the best laid plans of this mouse have shown a distinct tendency to make things worse for me on an hour by hour basis. What I want for next year is to let go of the barricade that’s been telling me it’s keeping me safe, and trust the stream of my life to carry me into the future. I need to trust that the waves of feeling won’t drown me, not because I have suddenly discovered an effective defence, but because I now see that the turbulence is a helpful reminder to let go.

Time lays down your life from the little things you do over and over and over. So this year I intend to read the turbulence and let it remind me to let go of the riverbank over and over and over again. And see where it takes me.

It’s so simple. That’s the thing isn’t it, that life is so simple and we make it so complicated? We are animals. We are born, we live, if we’re lucky we procreate, and we die. The rest of it, the rest of it is not under our control any more than those are. For man proposes but God disposes. Life is what happens when we're making other plans.

The trick then, is to stop getting in the way.