NEW YEAR. OLD YEAR.

Never been much for New Year resolutions.  I prefer the day-by-day approach to self-improvement. 

The more I learn about human beings, the more gobsmacked I am by their unwillingness to change the simplest things in their lives. I have been presented with a resolution list by the occasional friend over the years. Each time the list notably omitted the one glaring behavior which most often sabotaged the resolver's goals for relationships and financial success. 

Our self-images remain static unless we consciously decide to change them. Gay men can be as bad at this as the relentlessly narcissistic beauty queens whose bloom has faded decades ago.

The success of fashion advertisements that pander to the desire of some women to remain untouched by time has led to a parade of grannies in stretch pants and floozy tops which reveal sun-damaged decolletage. They trudge along in murderous shoes. Their starkly clipped pageboy coiffures sway like fringed lampshades in the back of a moving pickup truck.

If you cling to an image of yourself as an adolescent into middle age, no resolution at the turn of a calendar page will yield anything new. What appears to be change is simply the superficial accessorizing of the old you. New look. Old baggage.

My own climb out of a fairly miserable self-image was not easy. New Year resolutions played no part. Steady work was punctuated with backsliding. But I adopted the habit in my early 20's of taking each day as a new chance to make some progress in some area of my life. However small.

I became a list maker. Keeping a running list on my home desk has been an amazing tool. I have done it for decades. I buy 3-in-by-5-in pads at a stationery store in bulk. Plain white paper. No fruit-colored sticky notes here. I also keep a paper calendar next to my current notepad. Yes, I'm still analog. I like to be able to easily view pad with list and calendar simultaneously without flipping through screens on a phone or computer. 

What do I keep on my list? I write down brief summaries of ideas that pop into my head. I write down groceries I need. I write down projects that need to be done around the house. I write down events, phone numbers, addresses, whatever seems worthy of saving. 

Each morning, I review the list from the day before. I start a new one. I drop things I have attended to or don't need. I carry over things worthy of attention. I transcribe things with a longer time line to my calendar. I transcribe names and phone numbers into my phone/email contacts. My lists, updated daily, are a live feed of my objectives. They keep me on point.

I have kept a promise to myself for nearly fifty years to never ignore something that is important to my physical, financial or psychological health. My lists have helped me keep that promise. If I have felt poorly, for example, I might write "Look up fatigue." on my list. That gets crossed off later in favor of items coming from that research, which yields other items, and so on. Any item that I carry over more than once must either be dropped or dealt with ASAP. 

I believe that denial and procrastination are major contributors to chronic human intransigence. No New Year resolution will pierce through that without daily effort of some kind. So, I've observed, many people live the same old year each new year. They may tweak some superficial details, but they stay the same year after year. This leads to variations of arrogant self-satisfaction or chronic self-loathing for many. 

This sameness, and clinging to it for security, crashes on the rocks of inevitable change as we age. Deluding myself into thinking losing ten pounds or traveling to China will significantly change who I am without any other effort is tempting. But pretending that the new year will magically be anything much different from the old year without daily effort (and possibly regular help from others) is the path to more frustration and less self esteem.