Resolutions

New Year's Resolutions. As if.

When I was a kid, we used to say to each other, "Rules are made to be broken." OK, technically they're made to be followed, but it's just the kind of thing kids say when they're daring each other to misbehave: think staying out after dark, soaping and egging windows on Mischief Night, trying your first cigarette. A few years older and the saying became "Laws are made to be broken": illegal parking, ditching school, trying marijuana for the first time.

So here's one for the older, wiser me: Resolutions are made to be broken. Again, technically they're made to be kept, but you get the idea. It's like when the guy in John Steinbeck's The Pearl finds a huge pearl in an oyster. He calls it the Pearl of the World and immediately begins making plans for the future--he and his wife, dirt-poor now, would get a house and their son would go to school. But, the narrator wisely warns us, when you make a plan, you're just asking for trouble. Robert Frost wrote "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," but Steinbeck opined that there's also something in the world that doesn't love a plan, and as soon as you make one, that thing sets to work to try to thwart and spoil your measly, wimpy, little plan.

So, having diligently read my Steinbeck and my Frost, here's my take on the New Year's Resolution: don't bother, because "Something there is that doesn't love a [plan]."