Editor’s Page: Keeping It Simple

When the clock struck midnight in 2000 and I convinced myself that Y2K wouldn’t actually cripple the very fabric of our society, I promised myself I’d dunk a basketball on a regulation hoop by year’s end.

In 2008, I resolved myself to learn and fluently speak Spanish over the course of a mere 12-month period. 
In 2012, I was convinced I’d write a hit based-on-true-events screenplay about a roadtrip to, of all places, Scranton, Pennsylvania.

What do these three seemingly unrelated New Year’s resolutions have in common? 

I didn’t come anywhere close to accomplishing any of them (unless you give me credit for that one time I miraculously dunked a tennis ball).

We put a lot of pressure on ourselves with our New Year’s resolutions, don’t we?

So many of us take the New-Year, New-You motto to the extreme, believing that if we just buckle down and focus we can achieve the unachievable, we can alter our very nature.

In this month’s Behind Closed Doors, our longtime humor columnist Paula Watkins takes an introspective look at why she failed to achieve any of the resolutions she set for herself in a way that only she can.

While she offers a lot of funny and interesting reasons (especially the Page Six-worthy hoarding admission), the underlying cause of Ms. Watkins’ failure is essentially the same as mine: She greatly overestimated who she was and what she was capable of accomplishing.

Another major flaw of New Year’s resolutions is they often fail to account for the outside forces that don’t care about our hopes, goals and expectations. We could do everything we set our minds to, but if the universe doesn’t feel like playing ball, then tough luck, it ain’t happening.

This month’s cover story on the far-reaching effects of the CMS physician pay cut, expertly reported by Senior Editor Adam Taylor, is a good example of how those outside forces produce a variety of consequences outside of our control. All we can do is deal with these things as they occur.

So what does it all mean? For me, it means that I’m going easy on myself this year. No more grandiose goals — I’m keeping it simple in 2023.

As of press time, the only resolution I made for next year was to walk my beloved Boston Terrier, Judith Weiland (pictured), after I drop my kids off at the bus stop each morning. A walk a day; that’s the goal. And look, even that low-stakes resolution is contingent upon certain factors. For instance, rain, even the lightest mist, will mean Judith and I get a reprieve from the daily resolution ramble.

Based on the tireless, Type-A nature of so many of our readers, my guess is you have much loftier goals for yourselves. My only advice is to take it easy on yourself if you don’t achieve everything you set out to. After all, every year, as Ms. Watkins says, “is another chance to get it right.” OSM