I’m a person who has made an awful lot of personal resolutions — to change, to quit something, to stick to something new.
Have I always been successful? No.
But sometimes I have been. Sometimes the resolution has stuck. I lost some weight. I finally stopped buying my own excuses and launched a successful writing career.
But no, I didn’t quit caffeine. Not forever anyway. (I drank a bunch of coffee this morning.) Nor did I do countless other things I resolved to do.
But if I’d never set any resolutions, I wouldn’t have enacted the personal change I _did _manage.
So I’m big on resolutions. It’s true. But here’s the thing: I don’t necessarily set them on New Year’s. Many years I haven’t made a New Year’s Resolution. Typically, those years I didn’t do the New Year’s Resolution thing, I already had some kind of personal improvement project already underway that was taking a lot of my time, energy, and self-control.
And a lot of times, I set resolutions at other times during the year. A popular time for me has been in the time leading up to my birthday — which isn’t the new calendar year, but I suppose is a better reflection of when the new chronological/biological year starts for me.
But there have also been times when I arbitrary resolved to do something at an odd time.
The Poly Land project is one of those times. Poly Land’s birthday — the time at which it became a site with daily new content — is September 1, 2016. I posted near-daily in August and about every other day in July.
I made the resolution to start posting every day and edit and finally publish the book I’d written in 2012… in the summer of 2016. And that was one of the most successful resolutions I’ve made.
You Can Make a Resolution Anytime, New Year Not Required #
So to everyone who is making New Year’s Resolutions, I wish you all the success in the world in either meeting your goals — or achieving something else that is productive in the pursuit of them.
But I want you to remember that you can make a resolution anytime, no new year required.
No permission required.
And if any of you folks aren’t feeling the whole resolution thing at the moment — since 2020 was a long and challenging year for so many people– that’s okay, too. Take whatever time you need to recover from this. You can make a resolution when you’re ready.