Welcome, 2021!
Those dreaded New Year’s resolutions, ugh! In a normal year we might make five or six commitments to do better in various areas of our lives in the New Year, only to break most of them by the end of the month. We all know it’s true, even if we don’t want to admit it.
“After the 2020 that we just experienced, I think most of us will be thinking differently about our resolutions for 2021.”
But sometimes we keep one or two of those commitments. And those one or two really do make our lives better. Other commitments we may only partially maintain, but even that partial success can add value significant to our lives. Maybe we promise ourselves we will lose 50 pounds next year (probably unrealistic for most of us anyway), and we end up losing 25 pounds. This will still make our lives better. Maybe we promise to spend every Friday with our families. Perhaps we manage to do it 3 out of 4 Fridays a month. That is much better than spending NO Fridays with our families. So making such commitments actually does help us, even if we don’t keep them all, or only partially keep them.
After the 2020 that we just experienced, I think most of us will be thinking differently about our resolutions for 2021. Though we may still try to do the normal things like losing weight and exercising more, I think this year we will be thinking deeper than that.
We will be thinking about all the people we lost to the pandemic and how we can honor their memories even though we could not have a normal funeral for them. We will be thinking about all the dinners with extended friends and family that did not happen due to social distancing and how we will try to rebuild our relationships that were reduced to social media chats for so many months. We will be thinking much more carefully about people around us who have a cold, or a cough, and those same people will be thinking more critically about us when we have a cold or a cough. We will learn to wear a mask more often without a government mandate and we will not find it unusual when we see someone else wearing a mask out in public. We will probably all wash our hands more. Hopefully, we will all care more deeply about the elderly around us and the disabled that struggled more during the pandemic.
The New Year is likely to be a year of reflection. I think that is good. We all need some serious reflection from time to time. I believe our culture of rushing from one meeting, soccer game or event to another was having a more negative impact than we might have realized. And 2020, as terrible and frustrating as it was, caused us to reflect more on what really was important to us. And that’s a good thing.
Welcome 2021 and the reflective changes it brings. And let’s joyfully wave goodbye to 2020 and hope we never have a year like that again!
Dr. Terry W. Dorsett serves as the executive director of the Baptist Convention of New England.