You Are Here

It's ninety minutes to midnight when we push aside our drinks. "Let's write them down!" Our resolutions, we mean. We'd discussed them over dinner, but we're not finished yet. Speedy extracts a pen from her purse and I grab some cocktail napkins.

We resolve as most people resolve - to improve our lives with professional advancement, killer black dresses, and boyfriends good enough to fight with. Dr. K wants to avoid insanity and get gumption. I want to learn to speak Mandarin and play Texas Hold 'Em. Speedy will escape her second job. MJ initially refuses to go down the futile promise route, then decides to call her friends more frequently. Collectively, we add one to the top of the list:

1) Do this stuff. Really, really.

Maybe it'll make the difference that we wrote our promises in ink, but probably it won't. Probably, the napkin-lists we save will be like fragments of a map, the bits that say 'You Are Here', this is what you wanted when. Not that we won't accomplish our goals; I think we will. But I don't think it'll be because we took the time to define them. The theory about goals being only as attainable as they are specific is, in my opinion, complete crap.

Instead, we'll succeed because of that top line, assuming we have the good sense to heed it. In 2006, I learned that it doesn't matter so much what your resolutions are. What matters is being resolute.