Happy New Year. If that banging in your ears isn't the repercussion of last eve's count down, it most assuredly is me hammering this poor keyboard to beat last year's last deadline.
Please read quietly, some of us might still be sleeping our resolutions off.
I always wake up optimistic on January 1st, no matter how I felt the day before. It's a new start, a reset. I don't make resolutions, I make resolve.
I understand this is a character defect. Blame my parents if you must. Everything is wrong and everything is somebody else's fault these days. Optimism is unhealthy and hope is bad word. In America2016! it only counts if it's profitable and hope isn't.
Today's version of an optimist is someone who buys a hover board--which is actually neither--hoping it won't burn the house down.
But here I am feeling good about a new year. I'm feeling clear that if you look for good you're mostly going to find it. In this, I am resolute.
Speaking of, did you make any resolutions for the new year? I know a few are already broken from personal experience. Most resolutions are broken within a month. I have a firm grasp of the obvious.
Ever wonder why? Maybe we break them because we don't really know what a resolution is. A New Year's Resolution is generally in the form of "I resolve to quit (fill in the blank) or to start (fill in the blank)". It's either a declaration of a beginning or an end.
That always bugged me.
Besides the optimist curse, my mom yoked me with curiosity. So I surfed over to the Webster's dictionary website and looked up the term 'resolution'. You can't understand a word if you don't know the definition (more obviousness). 99.9% of Americans without cable TV swear by Websters.
The first definition for resolution is: The act of finding an answer or solution to a conflict, problem, etc.
The second definition for resolution is: an answer or solution to something.
The third definition for resolution is: the ability of a device to show an image clearly or with a lot of detail.
None of those really sound like what we're doing with New Year's Resolutions to me. A resolution is more an answer than a declaration and there's more than a subtle difference between the two.
In most cases, declarations are what you make when you don't really have answers. I can only think of one declaration in our history that had much staying power. But that one was written in the age of reason.
Like optimism, reason is sorely lacking in America2016! America. You might say it's been trumped. We're a reality tv nation and reality tv has but one reason. That's right, to get you to buy.
The silver lining in that cloud is the ratings for reality TV nation are bad and getting worse. The millenial generation isn't watching. They're reading, they're listening. And they're voting.
So it's New Year's Day and despite much, it looks good to me. How could it not? I'm still here and that's a good reason to believe.