Pearls: Can I still change?
EDITORIAL MUG: Matt Pearl
Does the New Year hold great potential for us? Yes, always. Will we seize the promises that 2024 offers and see them realized? That’s a bit more complicated to answer.
I’ll start with some personal perspectives. Generally, as I look back on an expiring year, I cannot help but see my shortcomings. I see the promises I made myself last year – mainly, the promises I didn’t keep – and I begin to wonder: Can I still change?
It sounds ridiculous. I know that in the reckoning of most folks, I’m still a young man. But I have lived long enough to develop habits, norms, routines. When I attempt to add an item to the schedule, or to remove something that no longer really belongs, I find it difficult for me to effect change.
One day, I couldn’t tell you when, it got tough to do 10 pushups each day, but I know that if beginning Jan. 1, 2024, I did those 10 pushups each day, I would improve my life a bit. They would get easier, and I could add more, or stop to do a few sets of them each day.
Where is my resolve? What could compel me to improve as a man – as a husband, as a father, as a on, as a member of society – when I can’t make myself do pushups?
I’m not ready to call myself a lost cause, but it’s difficult to be the person you think you ought to be, isn’t it? Is there one among us who is exactly the adult that he or she envisioned growing up?
And the holidays can really add to the tension. We set expectations for our experiences, for our gift giving, for our special meals and get-togethers, and even for our happiness. Grandma has to make that kind of pie, and then it’s Christmas. There have to be these kinds of chocolate in the stockings, and then it’s Christmas. We have to get to a movie on this day of winter break and then it’s Christmas.
Some years, it all happens just right – every meal, every gift, every sugar cookie – and how do we feel when it’s over? We’re exhausted. We’re anxious. Christmas and New Year’s are over, the family has gone back to their homes, the kids are about to head to school, and we realized that the break wan’t even a break at all.
Why do we put so much pressure on ourselves? Did you get that in the nativity account told in Luke Chapter 2? Or maybe the one in Matthew Chapters 1-2? Was it the part where the Son of God is born in the country and placed in a manger that compels you to get every wreath and candy cane in the right spot?
So I believe we have established there’s no strictly religious justification to drive ourselves crazy with anxious worry, which is a relief.
It’s the same with New Year’s resolutions. Who ever said that you and I need to put intense pressure upon ourselves to reform all of our imperfections with a seeping series of promises? And so we have arrived back a the question that has been plaguing me since the last present was unwrapped and the count to the New Year began: Can I still change?
Well, I can tell you what I do know. If I draw up a list of five major improvements I would like to make over the next 12 months, I’ll feel overwhelmed before Jan. 1 is over.
This year, I might keep it pretty simple: In 2024,I hope to do what is right, ask for grace and give grace to others, and to be more thankful for the way things go and less expectant that all things go s I have planned.
And, if I can fit 10 pushups in every day, then so be it.
Matt Pearl owns and operates The Tri-County Ledger.
