On resolutions: Say "no" to crabs.

The idea of taking stock of one's life and setting goals is a worthy thing and I do admire the inclination. Believe it or not, I actually have goals and dreams of my own, as un-plotted as my path may appear to others. However, the thought of year-end reflection and goal-setting for the coming year seems incredibly lazy, to me. If there's something to which you aspire, you don't wait a day to embark on steps which propel you in that direction. In July, you don't say you're going to save your pennies beginning January 1. You drop the .03 from your pocket into a bin that day and get started.

I appreciate that someone took the trouble to figure out our solar cycle and identify our year into quantifiable units, but being a terrier at heart, I resent the tyranny of the calendar and will bloody well do things on my own time. I believe if you wish to alter your course, you must be resolved daily to that end and not functioning on someone else's time-table. Every person is capable of making more of their lives, if they will but choose to do so and there is no time like the present.

Misery is a bitch, and they say she loves company, but I don't agree. Misery doesn't love company. Misery loves miserable company. Negative people have accepted the limitations of life and have stopped looking for a way out of the morass, and want you to stop struggling, too. They want you to hunker down with them and accept defeat and squalor and to sit around licking your wounds with them.

Someone online said this brilliantly yesterday:

There will never be a shortage of people to argue for your limitations. They aren't telling you your story, they are telling you theirs. If you agree it becomes your story, too.

Have you ever seen a crab trap? It has an open hole at the top where the crabs crawl in. The crabs are nimble things and could crawl out of the trap, but once a bunch of them are in, when one canny crab starts to crawl out, the others will pull the fleeing crab back into the pot and to their communal doom.

All this is by way of saying if you must set and aspire to goals, do so at your own pace, on your own time-frame. This is merely a coincidence that today is the last day of the year, but I am resolved to not use someone else's failures and limitations as a template for my own course. That has nothing to do with the coming year and everything to do with me.