One Good Intention

2010 was a shit year. I know everyone says this about every year, but this one genuinely earned it. Not enough sex, not enough love, not enough of those moments you actually want to hold onto—the kind you’d tell someone about years later, assuming you survive long enough to have the conversation. So here at the end of December I scrape together whatever’s left after eleven months of routine and low-grade exhaustion and make the usual promises to myself.

The list practically writes itself. The gut has to go. The cigarettes. The junk food. The job has been grinding me down for longer than I care to admit, the relationship is more inertia than passion, the mornings are wasted when they could be spent running. Travel more. See something outside this loop. Stop being such a relentless misery about everything. Fuck you, old life. Hello, sexy future. You mean every word of it every single time you say it.

But I’ve been through enough of these to know the list itself is what kills you. Too many resolutions is just too many ways to fail before January is out. They all compete for the same narrow margin of self-discipline, and when one collapses the others follow. Quit smoking, lose weight, call people back, be less of a bastard—spread across five goals you’ve completed none of them by the time February arrives with its grey indifference.

So I stripped it back. Crossed things off until one remained—the one that, if I actually followed through on it, would make the others feel less urgent. I wrote it on a piece of paper and taped it above my bed. They say that helps, the physical act of writing it, putting it somewhere you have to look at it every morning. Maybe it does. Maybe you just internalize it until it stops being a resolution and becomes the thing you do. Either way, one honest commitment is worth more than a list of ten I’ll quietly abandon by the time the month gets bored of itself.