Sticking to those resolutions through the decades

Despite all my angst, I had a wonderful Christmas. It turns out I’m the queen of charades – and now here we are heading into a whole new year, a whole new decade, my sixth on the planet … even though I’m only in my 40s.

Yes, truly: anyone born between 1970 and 1979 is entering their sixth decade. Terrifying. So, time to make a new year’s resolution perhaps? I have long resolved to never make a resolution again. Whoever succeeds at these things?

It’s tough to give up sugar or fags or booze or go to bed early or take up boxing/crochet/mindfulness in the middle of party season.

I don’t make resolutions simply because I don’t keep them, and nobody wants to start a fresh year already failing. But then on Christmas Day, as I wrestled yet another turkey I wouldn’t eat into the oven, I realised I had been successful with one massive resolution.

At the end of 1984, I vowed I would stop eating meat in the new year, and I did. I was 13. Yes, it was tough at first. My mother made my favourite chicken dish – was that on purpose, mum? – and, drooling, I ate just the sauce, flirting wildly with the flesh.

My dad rushed to the family doctor in a panic, but the doc just said “good for Jennie”, so my folks encouraged me to at least eat fish in that long-ago South Africa of mandatory meat, and thus started my whole new way of being. Then, just like that, 36 years went by.

So I think maybe I’ve proved I actually can do this resolution thing; I think I’m ready to try another one. Losing weight would be good, or learning Italian, or staying on top of paperwork, or, crucially, mastering time management.

I’d love to organise my time better, because I doubt I have another 36 years. Looking back, the trick to keeping resolutions is recognising how tough it’ll be at first, but knowing too that it will get easier.

And, most importantly, when you slip, when you find yourself licking the sauce off a chicken breast in despair, fighting back tears of hunger and self-loathing, remember that it’s always better to climb back onto the wagon than to fall off, because one doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the other.

Happy new year

For more news your way, download The Citizen’s app for iOS and Android.