RESOLUTIONS: AN ACCIDENTAL DEMISE

You know that popular thought among the non believers of the book ‘Secret” – “when something gets real good in one part of your life, something else is completely falling apart”. Well it comes true for me very often. I don’t call myself an optimist, but I don’t think life is a beach either. But the one thing I would definitely call myself is a dreamer!! My hopes are unlimited and so have been the resolutions I have taken. In number. 

So I keep making these resolutions every few months – bathe every day, write once a week, read 2 books a month, exercise 5 days a week and so on. I have tried every available strategy from habit forming techniques to journaling, reminders and to do lists. But none of them work for me. You know why? I will tell you why! Because every time I decide to do something, and plan for it, something happens which makes it impossible to follow through my plan. 

Take the bathing example. This resolution is usually taken in summer, when it is hot and taking showers is a good welcome activity. But what follows a few months down the line is winter – the harsh, unforgiving winters of North India. Imagine yourself covered in three layers of woollens, and spending every free moment in front of the heater. Feel the cold rooms and walls and beds. And now imagine you have to shed all that insulation which keeps you alive.... for what? To keep up my resolution of bathing every day? And spend an hour afterwards covered in blankets and shivering and waiting for the heat to come back into the body? No way! Torturing myself with this bathing mania every other day is fine during winters!!!

I agree that was not much of an excuse for not keeping my resolution. But this next one will blow your mind away. Exercise 5 days a week. You imagine yourself slowly getting pumped up. You download the best apps, you buy the equipment or take that gym membership, and you watch inspirational videos. The motivation is slowly building up. You know you can reach that perfectly sculpted body. You feel like the hero in those motivational sports movie where he gets the awakening and he is working hard and going to win the medal. You too are there in that mental plane, and are just raring to go. And the next day you fall sick. Or worse, your kids fall ill. If you have kids, you know how they become when they are ill. They become these tiny wailing, sniffling warm balls which attach themselves to you for comfort and care and you would inhuman if their cries and eyes don’t melt you. I have two of them who catch the illness from each other consecutively, and then pass it on to me in the end. So the whole affair lasts for weeks!! I those days it is lucky if I can do anything beyond make soups or porridge and feed the kids. Entire house and life does become messy but then who cares? All you want at that time is for your kids to stop hurting and become their usual happy self as soon as possible!!

So all my resolutions of exercise, reading, writing etc goes for a toss. To get to the above mentioned motivation for anything after weeks of mentally and physically exhausting caretaking, is impossible. Many weeks, go by. Then one fine day I would chance upon a note or see something which would trigger my head and off I would go to make another resolution. I start pumping myself up again, and get myself raring to go, until the next accident where it gets killed again!!!