Letters From Next Year
The end of the year is coming up rapidly – two weeks until New Year’s Day – and with the new year, traditionally, come the new year’s resolutions. We’re turning over a new leaf, we say; we’re going to set aside the bad habits of the old year and establish good habits. We’re going to hit the gym four times a week, eat half the calories, and take that acting course we’ve always wanted to take.
But let’s be honest with ourselves. We aren’t. Our resolutions make us feel better in the short term, but unless we have almost superhuman persistence, we don’t keep these resolutions. Our confidence, or our desire, wavers. We falter. Four days a week becomes three, and then one, and then “when I remember”, and pretty soon going to the gym makes you feel so bad for missing days that you just stop going entirely.
This year (and hopefully for years in the future), I’m suggesting an alternative: call it a time capsule. Instead of making resolutions, set aside fifteen minutes or half an hour, and write a newsletter – my great-grandfather called them “letteramas” – talking about the year you’ve just had, from the perspective of yourself, one year in the future. In other words, you’re going to be relating news that hasn’t happened yet.
This is, obviously, an exercise in creative writing. We don’t know with any degree of certainty what’s going to happen in the next year; we might get hit by a bus or win the lottery. We can extrapolate from our current desires, goals, and positions in life, though, and maintain as much verisimilitude as we can when we’re writing our letteramas.
Once you’re done, put your letterama in a safe place. Every so often, come back to it and review it; how closely have you hewn to the path you wanted to take at the beginning of the year? If you’ve strayed from your chosen course, consider why you’ve strayed; just because you’re doing things differently than you wanted to doesn’t mean you’re worse off! And if you have stepped off the path, and would rather be back on it, don’t feel bad; just figure out what you need to do to get back on track.
Resolutions are fleeting, a way to assuage the guilt you feel for not having done enough last year, and to feel good about what you’re going to do this year, but they really kind of suck as ways to achieve control over your life. By writing your letterama, you’re giving yourself a path to victory – and by writing it from the perspective of yourself a year in the future, you grant yourself a little extra perspective that a from-this-point-forward game plan wouldn’t carry.
My letters:
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