A new year, a new you ... maybe?

The endings and beginnings of years are arbitrary measures in cosmic terms, but hey, if they can kick him into taking positive actions in his life, our columnist will embrace them wholeheartedly! — 123rf.com

Welcome to 2023. It’s a whole new year, though right now, in this first week, it looks and feels a lot like the old one. But then a new year is pretty much an arbitrary endpoint. Humans like to impose order where there is none. It helps organise things and gives our lives shape, so why not embrace the new year?

I’m trying.

So I’ve decided to make some New Year’s resolutions. Which I seldom do, because most years I feel like, why would I wait for a new year to do something? Most years, I’d just make the change during the year. Well, blame it on being a parent, or old, or both, but that doesn’t happen any more. I see things I’d like to change and I’m just too tired to actually do it. That’s why this year I’m embracing arbitrary endpoints.

On to my New Year’s resolutions.

The first is about reading. I want to read. Again. I used to be a voracious reader. When I got my literary agent years ago, he described the state of book sales then as 60%-80% going to female readers. Books lost the casual male reader to video games and movies. To my shame, that has described me to a T for a while now.

I tried to get back into reading last year and it didn’t work. My attention span has largely atrophied. No longer am I capable of reading long passages about the winding architecture of a monastery – not that I was ever particularly fond of reading that kind of thing, but I could. These days, I skip pages. Something I never did in the past.

To counter this limitation and get my attention span back, I’m resolving to read five pages a day. If I read more, terrific! But I’ll never read fewer than five pages a day. Time to get my reading mojo back! At five pages a day, at minimum I should be able to read 1,800+ pages this year. Assuming about 300 pages per book, that is about six books in the year. If I read more, awesome. But I resolve to read no fewer than that. Go, reading!

The next resolution is to get back into physical shape. I’ve always been a guy that’s been “in shape”. Never super buff but never overweight either. Well, 2022 started to push me firmly into the overweight category.

I felt like I might be gaining some weight and my wife confirmed it when, watching me waddle through our kitchen shirtless one morning, she commented, “I’ve never seen you have those folds of skin there and there”. She was pointing at my love handles. And I knew I had those folds there because I could feel them. The point of verifiable weight gain.

After that, I told myself it’s a slippery slope and I need to get on top of getting into shape – but once again, I didn’t do anything. Blame my child. Blame my fatigue. Blame my lazy love handles folding over each other, but I didn’t get up and do anything.

Well, here’s the resolution. I’m going to commit to more intermittent fasting, eating early in the evening, skipping breakfast, and waiting for lunch. Then I’m going to get back into rock climbing. It's something I’ve always loved doing but haven’t been keeping up with, partly because when I get back on the wall I can’t move like I used to, a combination of being weaker and fatter literally weighing me down. Rock climbing is something I always pictured teaching my boy how to do – well, if I’m going to teach him, I need to keep it up so I can actually climb with him when the time comes.

So there are my resolutions: Read five pages a day, stick to intermittent fasting, and rock climb more. Not the most novel of resolutions but they will definitely improve my quality of life.

And that’s the power of the arbitrary endpoint. Maybe in the cosmic sense, another orbit around our sun doesn’t mean very much, but if we as individuals can give the new year meaning, then the new year means something after all.

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Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.