‘Twas the night before a new year, and all through the land, people were making promises they’d never quite manage to stand…
By February, the gyms would be empty again, the journals abandoned, the diets forgotten, and life would return to its comfortable, chaotic normalcy. Such is the grand tradition of New Year’s resolutions – that annual ritual of self-delusion we perform with touching optimism and spectacular failure rates.
I’ll confess my own pitiful track record – I have never had a New Year’s resolution last beyond a couple of weeks before I fall again into my merry old ways. I am a serial resolution-breaker, a repeat offender in the court of good intentions. But one year, quite accidentally, I stumbled into keeping one – and it was gloriously absurd.
I woke one New Year’s morning camped on the embankment of a beautiful dam with friends. Everyone was still asleep after raucous New Year’s Eve celebrations, mouths agape, limbs akimbo, looking like casualties of festivities rather than revellers. I was in awe with the perfect new year as it dawned next to the spectacular dam which was still as a reflective mirror, surrounded by majestic mountains. The world felt newly minted, pristine, full of possibility.
I suspected that soon a few heavily hungover people were going to arise and be famished. So I lit a fire, grabbed all the meat I could find, and once I had a searing hot bed of coals, I started to braai. This was such a perfect morning and I thoroughly enjoyed my solitary braai – the smoke curling skyward, the sizzle of fat on flame, the mountains watching in silent approval. So much so, that I decided to have a braai each day, for as long as I could. And when I reached 100 days, I thought, what the heck, I will continue for the entire 365 days of the year.
This places me in rare company, because most New Year’s resolutions die faster than Christmas trees in February.
And, I did it. Three hundred and sixty-five consecutive braais – and more, as some days I would braai more than once. Some were magnificent feasts, others were a simple length of boerewors or a mere braaibroodjie on a disposable grill in my driveway at midnight. But I kept the flame alive, literally and metaphorically. It was the stupidest, most wonderful resolution I never meant to make.
This places me in rare company, because most New Year’s resolutions die faster than Christmas trees in February. Research suggests that approximately 80% of resolutions fail by February, which is oddly specific and deeply depressing. But some failures are more spectacular than others.
Take the fellow who resolved to give up all forms of sitting for an entire year. He lasted four days before a combination of exhausted leg muscles and the realisation that modern life is designed around the chair defeated him utterly. Or the woman who vowed to respond to every email within five minutes, creating a Pavlovian nightmare where she couldn’t leave her phone for fear of in-box build-up. She made it eleven days before deleting her email app in a fit of liberation.
Then there’s the classic “dry January” resolution, attempted by millions and survived by only dozens. One particularly ambitious soul decided not just to abstain from alcohol but to publicly document his sobriety journey on social media. His last post, on 9 January, was a photo of an empty wine bottle with the caption: “I tried.” At least he was honest.
The gym membership resolution deserves its own category of failure. Fitness centres know this pattern so well they’ve built their entire business model around it – sign up hundreds of optimistic January joiners, knowing that by Valentine’s Day the place will be back to its core group of regulars. One gym-goer resolved to attend every single day at 5 am, invested in expensive activewear, and made it to 4 January before realising that sleep is, in fact, more important than biceps.
Food-related resolutions are particularly prone to collapse. “I’ll only eat vegetables” becomes “vegetables are plants, French fries are made from potatoes, potatoes are vegetables” faster than you can say “rationalisation.” Someone once resolved to eat nothing but raw food for a year and made it until the first cold winter evening when the siren song of hot, meaty soup proved irresistible.
Perhaps the most ambitious failure was the person who resolved to learn a new language, instrument, and sport simultaneously while also writing a novel. They managed two lingo lessons, one guitar chord, a single tennis lesson, and one sentence of their novel (which was, reportedly, “Chapter One”) before collapsing into exhausted surrender.
The truth is, we’re all just humans stumbling through life, making grand promises to ourselves in moments of champagne-induced optimism. Most resolutions fail not because we’re weak, but because they’re built on the fantasy that a change in calendar date comes with a personality transplant.
My braai resolution succeeded only because it was joyful, ridiculous, and mine – not borrowed from some wellness influencer or prescribed by societal expectation. It taught me that the best resolutions aren’t about becoming someone else; they’re about doing something that makes you grin like an idiot while you’re doing it.
So here’s to another year of broken promises, abandoned gym memberships, and forgotten diets. And here’s to the rare, stupid, wonderful resolutions we somehow keep – not because we should, but because they make us happy.
