RESOLUTION RESOLVE

JANUARY 1, 2025 – Quite apart from the opening weather forecast for this January (an inexorable descent into the deep freeze), a very positive aspect of turning the calendar from one year to the next is that yet again, a person gets to lay down a set of resolutions. This exercise is the most fundamental feature of “self-improvement.” I’m sure if you checked the “Self-help” shelves of any bookstore—virtual or traditional brick-and-mortar establishment—you’d find hidden among the many volumes, instructions about how to make New Year’s resolutions stick. You’d also likely discover ample advice on how to formulate such resolutions in the first place.

Yet, when all is said and done, I’d be curious to know the results of “scientific” (i.e. reliable) research on the success rate of New Year’s Resolutions. The probability is high that a meaningful study itself would be impossible. First off, the data would be skewed by the fact that not all people make resolutions. Second, developing a single resolution modest in nature, such as brushing your teeth daily for one minute with the electric toothbrush your spouse gave you for Christmas, is a whole lot simpler than committing to an exhaustive set of challenging resolutions, including, “drink less beer and drink more water” and “run 10 miles a day, rain or shine”—when at the outset of the year, a two-mile walk leaves you exhausted. Third, in the case of “less beer and more water,” how is quantity to be measured and monitored?

Be all that as it may, none of it should discourage us from using this occasion for setting new goals for ourselves, however modest or ambitious they might be. To enhance the odds of success, however, I recommend taking a page from fairy tales involving wishes; or more precisely, taking such a page and amending it as I always “wished” to do as a kid: Whenever a protagonist in a fairy tale was granted three wishes, I’d silently urge the character to use one of the wishes to wish for an unlimited number of additional wishes.[1] Likewise, in the context of making resolutions, include a resolution to follow your resolutions. Following the same logic of compulsion, for good measure add a further resolution to follow the resolution to adhere to the rest of your resolutions.

The key to resolve in following resolutions is discipline—often a euphemism for OCD behavior. A device I’ve deployed in this regard with a degree of success is detailed imagery.

My main device in the image department is the steep slope right in front of our family’s old summer cabin. It has such a pitch to it that my grandpa saw fit to launch a Herculean project involving manual excavation of the earth underneath the cabin, carting the dirt (umpteen hundred wheelbarrow loads) out through a doorway to the adjoining split-level garage behind the cabin and dumping all that soil out front behind a 50-foot-long stone masonry retaining wall that grandpa built (over a stretch of seven years) near the top of the bluff 20 feet in front of the cabin. Dad once remarked that absent Grandpa’s labors, if you weren’t thinking things through, you’d surely exit the front doorway of the cabin and tumble right down the slope 50 feet to the water’s edge.

To enhance the image of that steep slope, I add a playground slide. Not a modern one made of plastic, which over time gets scratched up and increases friction, but an old-style high altitude metal slide like the one at Franklin Elementary School in Anoka, which after two decades or more of use wound up with a polish so shiny, the sun glare at noon recess on a sunny day hurt my eyes on the descent. The glare actually increased the thrill, because I’d have to close my eyes, which meant I wasn’t sure just when and where the bottom was until my butt hit the ground.

So, anyway, I borrow an extended version of that old shiny metal slide and place it straight down among the giant red pine that hold tenaciously to the near vertical slope up there in front of our old family cabin. To make the ride even more harrowing, I imagine sitting on a thin cushion of banana peels. Perched at the top of the slide where it meets the edge of the retaining wall (which is flush with the level grade behind it), I carefully bend myself under the metal railing along the top of the retaining wall, gently lower my rear onto the banana peel cushion and . . . let go.

Then comes the critical part of this imagery: as my person accelerates down the slide at damn close to the rate of 9.8 meters per second squared, I go into “freeze frame” mode. This is the method I use to hyper-leverage my pre-existing condition clinically diagnosable (I imagine) obsessive compulsive disorder. In practical terms it’s the proverbial “slippery slope.”

The most publicly visible application of this “slippery slope” is this very blog. What other motivation, do you suppose, could match the force of physics involving my descent on a banana peel cushion on a shiny metal slide running at a 70-degree angle down a 50-foot slide threaded straight past the trunks of a stand of 125-year-old stalwart pines to the rocky shore of Grindstone Lake? Upon the mere thought of skipping a day’s post, this slippery slope image flashes across my poor brain, triggering abject fear that one day missed will all too easily expand to two, then four, then six—or holy terror upon terror—16 followed by 256, which is as good as curtains for this blog!

If applied to any one of a plethora of New Year’s Resolutions, the slippery slope method can be just as terrorizing—and effective.

As with so much else in life, context, however, is everything. When deployed upon the resolution to brush at least a minute daily with that new electric toothbrush, the slippery slope image is overkill. I mean, suppose something comes up, like your spouse screaming that a mouse is on the loose in the kitchen—“I saw it! I saw a mouse! Quick get it! . . . Did you hear me?! There’s a mouse in the kitchen! Your job is to catch it!” For the next half hour the sum total of your life’s purpose is diverted on an emergency mission to trap that (alleged) mouse. You rummage around in the cluttered workspace of the garage in search of that small basket of mouse traps—you know it’s there somewhere. Once you uncover it, you launch a secondary expedition in search of work gloves with which you can inspect the inventory of traps to find the least gross one. After inserting suitable bait (cheddar cheese or peanut butter?) you decide on the best strategic location for placing the trap, bearing in mind that you don’t want to put it on the floor under an overhanging cabinet or appliance where your spouse is apt to step, triggering the trap and scaring the bejeezus out of him (or her) who’s already obsessively scared of mice.

Where was I? Oh yeah . . . because of the rude interruption caused by the phantom mouse and consequent remedial measures, you forget altogether to brush your teeth with the new electric toothbrush. In such an instance, you’re highly unlikely to forget two days in a row. You’re not even close to a slippery slope, and thus, invocation of its image to salvage your New Year’s Resolution is unnecessary.

Okay, after all that . . . what are my New Year’s Resolutions and why should you be interested? You certainly needn’t be. But your curiosity serves a purpose: it enhances the likelihood that if you’ve read this far, you’ll continue. That assumption increases my motivation for publishing them. Publication improves the chances that I’ll adhere to my resolutions—thank you very much.

MY NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS:

1. Consume less sodium.
2. Drink more water.
3. Take deeper breaths.
4. Read more fiction . . . and . . .
5. Avoid the slippery slope: keep posting daily on this blog.

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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson

[1] Just so you know that I wasn’t suffering from some odd mental disorder, I knew that turning “three” into “an infinite number” would wreck the cadence of the story and make a royal mess of things altogether.