So we’ve reached another year and you may be wondering about your New Year’s resolution. What does it mean to resolve ourselves to something? What if we later decide it’s a bad idea?

How can we possibly decide to put ourselves on the hook for something? Particularly for a wandering mind, a mind that seems so deeply embedded in the Now, how can we make a promise?

How can we be kind to our Future Self when burdening them with some decisions of Past Self has rarely gone well?

How can we honor our Past Self, if they have given us something onerous?

Do those who resolve do so through “willpower”? If I read the room right, willpower seems to be defined as the ability to not only suppress emotion in service of something deemed “important”, but also act despite that suppression.

In other words, a person with willpower can summon will to fight the nature within themselves.

But somehow I find that just about every endeavor goes better when I guide the elements within rather than fight them. Maybe the work is less about a fight so much as it is in recognizing the emotional winds and waters of Present Self and setting sails accordingly.

Rather than consider ways to further enslave ourselves to a Past Self, why not consider what could better support our agency in the moment?

In this way, instead of focusing on working out an hour a day or something similar, we might instead focus on what small thing might make it easier to make it to the gym? The same principle applies just about everywhere.

– Kourosh

PS What small thing can you do that might make something important to you easier to get to or do?