by Heather Klem

Heather Klem

With each passing year, we can count on the unfailing presence of New Year’s Resolutions calling out to us from television ads, compelling us from magazine covers and even as conversation content among friends and family once the previously month‘s holidays have rolled into our rearview mirror. For many the New Year brings hope and opportunity for a fresh slate, a clean page on which to continue life’s story. Closing the chapter on the previous year as it draws to a conclusion offers the possibility of positive change as it relates to the fresh twelve months ahead, not yet blemished by mistakes. Many, myself included, feel invigorated by the knowledge that I have another 365 days ahead to “get it right” and penning out some resolutions on how I can remodel life for the new year is extremely attractive and tempting.

I have been known to tirelessly document these declarations, only to have the list lost under the pile of clutter I had vowed to expel from my life earlier that January. Inevitably I would find my list, or look back on it at some point in the New Year and feel awash in regret, a potent dose of shame, defeat and failure. My inner bully would begin rummaging through the archives in my memory, pulling factual evidence and statistics from multiple New Years past where I had used the same approach and again, fallen short. I had made little to no progress on the items I had hoped to change and was now left feeling a little more stuck and discouraged about my lack of personal willpower.

We live in a culture obsessed with unattainable perfection and perpetual improvement. We are taught that life begins when we have reached some zenith of success - some degree, published a book, purchased property, procured a picturesque family with the picket fence - all marks of achievement, triumph over the ordinary. Society is more than happy to continue to remind us that we are lacking without the lessons from that seminar or this book, that we will not have “made it” until we have mastered meditation, received a promotion or found a fulfilling relationship. We are constantly being bombarded with media that perpetuates this idea that we are simply inherently lacking and regularly in need of bettering ourselves. That the raw matter we are working with is inherently deficient and that we should always be in the business of betterment. All of these are most appealing in the shadow of the holidays when the New Year looms ahead and we perform an autopsy on the closing days of the current year, attempting to pinpoint areas where we weren’t up to par. We are more than happy to churn out the list of ways in which our lives can be better “if only”... with gusto. Companies push products and fitness plans boasting the ability to shrink our bodies into svelte shapes for the forthcoming year, or the newest gadgets promising increased productivity. Corporations, the media and society capitalize on our collective inadequacies and maintain the idea that our imperfect versions of ourselves are not sufficient.

I consider myself a retired professional in the arena of inner beat downs, having mastered the very relentless and harsh self castigation early in life. Today, while I have made significant strides out of these behavior patterns and inclinations, it is still far easier to practice self criticism than it is compassion. I am notorious for penning lengthy “to do” lists only to stare back at them with regret when the unpredictability of a given week prevented me from knocking off each item, or worse, when a lone number stared back at me and I once again felt like a failure. It is very easy for me to rattle off my shortcomings rather than try to examine my strengths. I am not constantly being exposed to messages that remind me of my wholeness, but rather of the ways in which I must try to improve the material that makes up Heather.

So, I realized that I didn’t want to be one of those individuals in the business of making delineated tasks or resolutions that I wished to achieve or embrace in the forthcoming year. I don’t want to partake in the mass effort to hitch my happiness star to an unattainable ideal or measure of success. There is no benefit to me to focus on gaps of motivation and productivity, the sore spots of the past year in self recrimination. I do not want to ease those ills by churning out a new catalog of changes. Instead, I can flex the self compassion muscle and call forth a few things I want to work on, but keep the focus on acceptance of the self and embracing my imperfections.

The truth is that looking back on 2011, if I had met all of my New Years Resolutions with success, would it have made my life any richer? Would I have learned more valuable lessons because I was able to maintain a consistently tidy apartment and be on time to every engagement I committed to? The answer to this is a wholehearted ‘No’. The fullness of the year for me has come from trials and tribulations, from my failures, and the hard and dark parts. I have gleaned wisdom and opportunity from those areas

I was attempting to alter and avoid. I will focus on measuring my motivation to revel in all that I am, turning on my flaws and shortcomings with love, rather than rejection. Even the soft spots that conventional society tells me I should be working hard to change, I’m going to love and embrace. I encourage everyone who is primed to conjure a rolling register of benchmarks for the forthcoming year, to examine the value they are placing on these alterations. We need a non-resolution revolution. We are all already perfectly imperfect and while self improvement is admirable and reaps many benefits, there are also areas ripe for growth that can best be fertilized by self compassion.

For 2012 I am going to use every ion of my being to practice radical self acceptance. Life does not begin after that next achievement, but rather when I learn to love and accept myself just as I am, as I write this today. I will not meticulously examine the pieces that are lacking, but instead revel