You don’t need a New Year resolution to change your life, I say.
Prayer might work, but resolution rarely does.
Yet:
The idea of the new year
resolution always visits me this time of year.
I have sometimes ignored the habitual target setting. This year, however, I wrote a poem about what
I would like to change: my perfected procrastination. My poem compares trying to change this habit to trying
to fill a bucket with droplets of water.
Both are difficult to impossible.
But writing about it, I reasoned, might have some impact. Later, I realized I didn’t like the poem
except for one word, “ingrained.” Here
are the lines:
“Imagine
changing
your dominant hand!
Habit is ingrained.”
Ingrained! As if a person was a wooden board treated with an
immoveable dye lot, a color like beet juice that just won’t let go. My ingrained procrastination mostly pertains
to writing. With a paragraph now and
then I treat the board, hoping to dilute the beet juice coloring. I see no progress, but try again and again, a
paragraph here, a page there, sometimes liking the page so much I imagine I see
a lighter shade of beet in the wood.
Then I say to someone—anyone—I’m writing again! With two exclamation
points. I more than say it, I brag it, I
delight in it, I imagine a whole book written, and me on a reading tour at
bookshop after bookshop. Of course, the
next day I must needs go to the Post office and shopping, and when I sit down
at the computer, I must do the wordle and crossword puzzle and words with
friends, and before I know it, it’s time for The News Hour and Jeopardy, and
then at 8pm it’s too late to start anything.
Tomorrow, I think. I had such a
good start yesterday. But tomorrow comes
and I am still ice skating on the frozen lake of achievement and self-admiration. Procrastination plays tricks with my head,
and I’m still ingrained with it, my wooden self is beet red.
Tears in a
Bucket
Catching my tears in
a bucket, I laugh
at imagining I could fill it
and then half smile at thinking
one day can ring change
with new year wonders.
As if we could wish
away habit with
impulse, as if we
could use magical
words to invent new
and good beginnings.
Procrastination's
my pitiable
habit. Though it is
not as tragic as
use of weapons, it
diminishes me.
Because habit is
easy, we think it's
simple to alter.
Imagine changing
your dominant hand!
Habit is ingrained.
Yet today is New
Year’s Day, another
day with another
chance to end habits—
the hard ones that play
over and over.
Would you rather fill
a bucket with tears?
I ask, then laugh and
grit my teeth with great
determination.
This time I may win.
