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At any other time of year, we’d set a “goal,” or make a “promise” or maybe even something as formal as a “plan.”

At New Year’s, though, we make a resolution.

Just the word itself conjures up an obstacle in our way that is so difficult to surmount that we can’t merely intend to overcome it — no. Whatever it is we hope to accomplish in this new year, it’s going to require resolve to do it — for us to dig down deep inside ourselves to find that wellspring of willpower, determination and grit that so eluded us over the past 365 days.

Clearly, New Year’s resolutions aren’t supposed to be easy.

Maybe we call them “resolutions” so that it sounds like something we can’t back out of, like it’s the product of our internal committee that, only after several rounds of compromise and bipartisan infighting, finally agreed to a course of action that is so important, they’ve stamped it and made it a resolution — as if bailing on that new gym membership by Easter isn’t just letting yourself down personally, it risks international sanctions.

For some people (we call them “showoffs”), a New Year’s resolution might be something that they really can follow through on. For most of us, though, we know that whatever it is we’ve decided to change about ourselves, other complications will likely get in the way, and slowly our resolve will drain away. And by Christmas, we’ll think back to that laughable goal we had set for ourselves, all those months ago. How reasonable it had seemed at the time!

But that’s OK.

At its core, a New Year’s resolution is an opportunity to look at ourselves critically, evaluate where we are not meeting our own expectations of ourselves, and trying to do better.

More than that, New Year’s resolutions are aspirational. They aren’t run-of-the-mill goals we set for ourselves, they’re resolutions, something that we think we ought to be able to do, but will be difficult to accomplish.

Even if we don’t succeed as much as we’d like, the coming of a new year offers us the chance to reacquaint ourselves with our deepest aspirations and discover new ones.

New Year’s resolutions can take many forms, from the unrealistic to the cynical to the deeply personal, to the exceedingly difficult to the trivially easy.

Deciding to try your hardest to make something about yourself match your own expectations, though, rarely is a waste of time, no matter how much or how little you spend doing it.

Let’s all resolve this year to resolve something at all.