With a brand new year on the horizon, I’ve thought about the resolutions I need to make to get me through 2026.
This year my resolutions are not about what I am going to do. My only resolution is what I am not going to do in the next 365 days.
I am resolving to give up pointless activity, actions that don’t work and are a waste of my time and resources, neither of which I have enough of.
So in the coming year I am not going to give advice to anyone. The people I’m wasting my good advice on are not listening anyway. They’re just waiting for my mouth to stop moving so that they can tell me what they’re going to do instead and why my excellent, logical advice won’t work for them.
For example, after I have given Bubbetta perfectly good advice about why she shouldn’t marry Larry the Loser, she will counter with this piece of wisdom:
“Well, that waiting and being sure and lookin’ for the right person sounds real good, but you don’t understand. Me and Larry are in luv! As soon as he gets out of prison for those bogus domestic abuse convictions on his first three wives, we gonna get married! He promised me he won’t hit me ‘ner hit his bosses no more neither, and he’s gonna get a good job this time and we’ll live happily ever after, you know?”
There is no way to argue with that logic, so I’m not going to clutter up 2026 trying to do so.
Along with giving up advising other people, I’m not going to try to change anyone’s life either.
For years I tried to get my husband to make a healthy choice and eat carrots and at least try one of my famous dishes made with cream of mushroom soup. He did eat one piece of a cooked carrot once, but that one tiny victory didn’t seem worth the waste of all the hours I’d spent fussing to get him to sample rabbit food. He has yet to dip into my Carrot and Cream of Mushroom Casserole. I’m through.
I will be quiet, and he can go back to the fried pork chops and gummy rice with brown gravy (that he will have to buy somewhere) and live the rest of his life in peace. So can I.
Actually, most adult people are living about the way they want to, even when it’s killing them. They may be entertained by listening to all our wise explanations of why they need to change, but they probably aren’t going to live our way. That includes our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren, unless we are holding a sizeable inheritance over their heads. I’m not.
If I were going to change anyone, it would be me, and I haven’t even had much luck with that.
Another pointless activity I’m giving up for 2026 is the act of enabling.
That means that your problem is not my problem this year. I’ve never been much of an enabler anyway, believing that most people can stand on their own two feet if they will, and if their human “crutches” will get out of their way.
But now I’m giving up any casual enabling I might have been doing because enabling keeps people from growing up and taking responsibility, and I like to deal with grownups.
If your issue can be solved with some help from me, and I can see that you’re working hard to make your own life better, I’m in. But 2026 won’t see me subsidizing or sympathizing with your unproductive behavior so that you can feel comfortable continuing down a dead-end road.
This does not relate to my two rather irresponsible dogs, however, so they need not get their dog panties in a wad. Because they don’t reason on the level of human beings, (though their reasoning is more advanced than Bubbetta’s), and because I’m a sucker for mutts, I let them have their way.
So I’ll keep wiping up their accidents and putting down wee-wee pads in anticipation of the time that they will actually use them. I’ll keep over feeding them because it makes them happy, and I’ll keep letting them sleep anywhere they want to on my side of the bed, even if I have to scrunch up a little to accommodate them. Maybe I can give up enabling them in 2027.
I’ve already given up cooking as Pointless Activity #1. Talk about a time waster! I was spending an hour at the store to get the ingredients, then two hours cooking or burning the Mushroom Soup Weiner Surprise, then another hour cleaning up and storing the left-overs— of which we seemed to have quite a bit. That’s four hours for a meal that took 10 minutes to swallow, less if I burned it and we could only eat the center.
Two years ago I decided that another pointless domestic activity that I had to dump was cleaning. I hired someone to do that for me, and it has certainly made life easier.
I like knowing that I’ve done away with so many unnecessary responsibilities! But then, knowing my history with keeping New Year’s resolutions, the very act of resolving to cut out these pointless activities may be the most pointless thing I’ve done this year!
