A SABBATICAL FROM NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS
1-2-04
This is my sabbatical from New Year’s resolutions. If the seventh day was given us to rest, I say the seventh year we should rest from tinkering with ourselves.
That’s what resolutions are. Just tinkering with our selves. Making us feel we are not good enough as we are. Making us grit our teeth and swear we will be better or different in some way.
There’s a time to tinker with our selves and a time to enjoy us as we are. Surely every seventh year we need to rest from all the exertions we put ourselves through. The only thing we should change in our sabbaticals is something that normally arises from becoming more of who we are. Just accept natural flowerings if they come, that’s all.
Now if you have made resolutions every year of your life, by all means declare this year your well-deserved sabbatical. Just relax into your being. Enjoy what you have been able to become. Savor yourself exactly as you are.
Keep in mind that most of those who want to change you – to “improve” you – have their motives. Some of them claim to just love you and want you to merely trim off something so they can love you more. Is that the kind of lover you want? Some want to conform you more to their beliefs. It just kills some folks for you not to believe everything they believe or to believe one single thing they don’t believe. They are the true believer control freaks.
Aside from these control people there are those who want to make a buck out of changing you. Think of what would happen to the book market if all the how-to-do-this-that-and-the-other books were eliminated. They want to tell you how to look better. Heck, I think most people look fine just like they are. I like variety. The law of averages says somebody has got to be ugly and it’s ok for me to be one. People who are too pretty get on my nerves anyway. I call them “protoplasmic mannequins.”
If you decide to leave yourself alone this year, think of what you are doing to the TV infomercials. They want to sell you a diet. Somebody has got to be fat for that same old law of averages to work so just settle into your fatness unless slimness just flowers out of your happiness this year. They want you to buy their exercise unit and look more like Tarzan. Listen, it’s alright for you and me to just have the body that comes from natural activities like walking, stooping, bending and running from creditors. Turn off the infomercials this year. People with too many muscles are scary.
All this stuff about changing yourself has made you miserable for too many years. It has done something horrible to you. It has made you unable to enjoy being who you are. It’s like the guy who took a stick and broke open a larva nest to make the larva took wing quicker. He killed them. People who poke and gouge at you just kill your spirit and keep you from enjoying being a larva. When life wants you to take wing, it will break the pouch open.
Mind you, I’m not telling you to be lazy unless you have decided to make this your lazy year. Out of three score and ten surely we are entitled to one lazy year. Grandfather Fluke of Bakewell Mountain said, “There’s a time to run and a time to sit down, a time to sweat and a time to bask in life’s cool breezes, and it’s up to you to know what time it is.”
I like you just like you are so when they jump you for telling them this is your year to simply enjoy the flowering of your own being, give me a call. I will not tolerate anyone messing up your sabbatical.
You may contact Dalton's website at www.daltonroberts.com or write him a DaltonRoberts@comcast.net. All his writings are gathered at www.IPSFeatures.com.
