La Voz de Galicia – January 3, 2025 →
The resolutions for this year? Not making more resolutions than the necessary ones. For example: doing everything possible to spend time with those I love. Stopping myself from nodding along when I don’t really understand what someone is telling me. Not making plans that I know I won’t be able to keep. Stopping myself from creating false expectations with the phrase, “let’s grab a coffee sometime” … These are small resolutions, but I believe they are relatively tangible. There were years when I promised myself things that I sometimes achieved simply for the sake of achieving them, and yet I didn’t end up feeling any better because of it. Doing for the sake of doing doesn’t bring happiness; but it does bring a false sense of personal accomplishment, which now, with age, I realize served no other purpose than teaching me that slow living, the life of small resolutions, is life itself, the precious life.
And the truth is, resolutions are necessary to survive, to have reasons to look forward. Resolutions guide our existence. But there’s something about the way we live nowadays that forces us (sometimes unintentionally, other times willingly) to embrace resolutions that aren’t always truly ours, but rather a reflection of that ideal life on social media. And the more we try to inhabit that ideal life, the harder it becomes to accept that real life is what it is: sometimes ugly, sometimes complicated, and sometimes unfair. And that the place where we exist is this real world, increasingly harder to bear.
The resolutions for this year? To have hope. To not expect anything in particular. To want to.
To keep being moved by the little things. To try to contribute something to the places I inhabit. To have more patience. To listen better. And to learn one new thing every day…