Lack of resolve on resolutions

Now that the 365-page-whatever desk calendar you got for Christmas a year ago is dwindling down to a few pages, have you given any thought to your New Year’s resolutions?

A new blank slate of a year is looming ahead. Are you going to blunder into it as if it were a half-used previous year, or are you going to make the effort to make it the Year of the Changed Person?

What will it be? Lose weight? Maximize use of the treadmill? The all-time favorite – be a kinder, better person? Lots of leeway with that one.

Actually, it’s easier — and more fun — to make resolutions for other people.

To the millennials who need to hide in their safe space from the big, bad world – resolve to spend some time serving in a soup kitchen. Or help a family clean up after a fire or flood.

To those who promised to leave the country if they didn’t get the candidate they wanted – learn the value of putting your money where your mouth is.

To disillusioned people everywhere – think about living in the now instead of in the what you’d like the world to be. Saw that on Facebook. It makes sense.

I don’t make resolutions. I learned a long time ago that I can’t keep them, even the ones I believe are no-brainers.

In my younger years, I was a pack and a half a day smoker. This was before people had to go outside to smoke and could stink up a room without fear of being ostracized. Everbody smoked.

Well, not everybody. One terminally perky co-worker made it her mission to rag on as many smokers as she could about quitting the habit. Right before New Year’s one year she circled the room trying to get people to make a resolution. I was ready for her.

“I resolve to smoke a pack and a half of cigarettes a day,” I announced. “I can keep that one.”

Five months later I quit smoking and haven’t touched a cigarette since.

I can’t even keep a phony resolution! So I just accept me for the flawed individual I am; there’s just no improving on me.

Now you on the other hand, have you considered…?