The champagne was still bubbling when the barrage of emails hit my inbox. Hollow "Happy New Year's!" followed by offers for how I can claim the "new" me. I was just getting to know me, but, you know, capitalism doesn't exactly work without upgrading the old model. Not that I'm old. Or am I?
In 2021, Men's Health petrified Millennials by boldly asserting – well, they did check the data – that middle age is 37. I'm still on the right side of that number, but signs of aging abound, if just not on my face. (Oh just let me have this one nice thing, will you?)
"Comparison is the thief of joy." -Theodore Roosevelt
I'm confronted by my age with the sinister tone that resolutions seem to take on in these marketing emails.
Join the CHALLENGE to CHANGE!
Have you manifested your DREAM life?
What will you ACHIEVE this year?
Your NEW LIFE awaits... take action NOW!
These aren't resolutions for 2025 we're making. These are resolutions for life. And I'm daunted by the assignment. Is the life I have already lived not enough? Am I not enough? Whatever happened to "eating healthier" being a sufficient – albeit noncommittal – answer to the self-improvement question?
"The best time to start was yesterday. The next best time to start is NOW." -Unknown
I like to think is because whoever said this peer pressure nonsense is ashamed to take credit for it.
If you were raised to give things up for Lent, resolutions were like the dry run of promises you never intended to keep. I'm going to exercise more, the adults said on January 1 with a wink – the same wink they'd give me two months later on my birthday, which always falls during Lent, when they'd say that God makes an exception for the birthday girls who gave up sweets. Definitely God did not say that in the Bible, but then again, God didn't say anything about giving things up for Lent, either.
Shame is the rod, and fear the whip. The whole tradition of strong arming ourselves into doing things that are "good for us" is outdated science. (Then again, the Notre Dame graduate in me wonders, what are traditions if not outdated?) James Clear's groundbreaking book Atomic Habits outlines the four steps to making a habit stick: it needs to be obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. I'm pretty sure if you uttered that positive cornucopia of words to one of the nuns who favored the ruler at my dad's grade school, her habit would do some sticking... up, that is.
Suffice to say, Lent and resolutions in my family never really quite stuck. That is, until three years ago, when I made a resolution to backpack Africa and did, then two years ago, run my first marathon and did, and then last year, made a resolution to write my first book and... did.
"Past performance does not guarantee future results." -U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
I'm not exactly prepared to live up to the gravitas of my past resolutions for 2025, let alone set some for the rest of my life.
(Top to Bottom) 2022: Backpacking Africa | 2023: Running the NYC Marathon | 2024: Writing a Memoir
But that didn't stop me from going into a deep, dark hole this week about what exactly it is that I want to do for the rest of my life, which, in my thirties, I feel obliged to have figured out.
I am a doer. I get caught up in the doing of things. I wish I could say that getting things done brought me a sense of accomplishment, but it doesn't. If there was a contest for who could make the longest to do list, I would win, because mine never ends. I have never met the end of my to do list. And so I never get the satisfaction of being done.
As a matter of fact, there is only one time I've ever heard the phrase, "well done!" and it's when my dad orders steak. I've never used that term to congratulate myself – and certainly not when ordering my own steak.
"Stick a fork in me, I'm done!" -My Grandma, exasperated
I wish I could say I was done, exasperated like my grandma. I'm done with the doing of this to do list! I imagine myself saying to myself, but I never would say that to the tyrant running the show in my own mind.
What do you want to do with the rest of your life? the tyrant mocks. How about you log these receipts and call the doctor's office and go for a run and then stare at the abysmal performance of your retirement portfolio as though you're actually going to do anything about it?
The tyrant doesn't take the question seriously, but I do. These influencer coaches with their Tony Robbins' subject lines have asked me what I want to be when I grow up and I need to have an answer before TIME RUNS OUT on the offer of LIFE.
What do I want to be when I grow up is a very different question than what do I want to do, and yet we answer them as though they are the same.
Pitching my tent at a hostel in South Africa (left). An American girl at the hostel left a pair of leggings behind on a waterfall hike. They became a cherished item in my kit (right).
At the beginning of my backpacking journey in South Africa, I was at a hostel with a bunch of Americans born a decade after I was, and when they found out my age, they had all sorts of questions for me. They were rising seniors in college doing research at the game park, and some of them were hoping to go to grad school. They were really worked up and anxious about "what’s next" for them. I could tell that they were all working hard, though some of them said that they felt like they weren’t working hard enough, that they could have been doing more, beating themselves up, all that stuff you say when you’re young and you don’t know any other way to be. (I say that like I don't still do it. We're working on it, the tyrant and me.)
I remember one young man telling me that before he left for the summer, his father warned him. "This is the time in your life when you’re going to make mistakes and that’s okay, it’s okay to make mistakes but just make sure you’re not making the irreversible ones." You can fuck up but not too much, this father was telling his son. So the son explained to me that he was trying to make sure he was having a little fun but mostly staying out of trouble, but to be honest, this kid struck me as the kind of kid whose idea of fun wasn't in any generally accepted definition of the word. This kid could definitely be having more fun.
"I just don't want to do anything that I'm going to regret," he said.
"Well, here’s another way to look at it," I offered. "What are the things that you’re not doing today that ten years from now, when you’re my age, you look back on your life and think, 'Oh, I regret missing out on that.' Maybe that's the irreversible mistake you should be worried about."
He thought about it for a moment, but his answer was quick. "I should be having more fun. I'm young. I'm healthy. I should take the time off to do the things that I want to do."
I nodded. "That's the conclusion that I came to. I spent my entire twenties working harder than anyone I'd ever met. There was not a harder worker than me. Kudos to me."
He laughed, knowingly.
"When I die," I said, "I'm not going to look back on my life and say, 'Wow, I'm so glad that I worked.' No. You're never going to look back and say, 'Work really fulfilled me.' You know? Live your life as though it is temporary. As though any day you might not have it. Don't save your dreams for a tomorrow that might never come."
You should be thinking from the end. What do you want the ending of your story to be when you get to the end? Do whatever will make you say, 'Yeah, I did it. I lived. And I'm ready to move on.'
By now, that kid is probably in grad school, having less fun than he was having when I met him. Meanwhile I did those things I set out to do – travel the world, find myself, reclaim my joy – and now I'm staring in the face of resolutions at a loss for what I want to do, a bit exhausted by the bigness with which I've been living life.
On the other side of life lived, I'm realizing that the question – and my understanding of what it is like to look back on your life on your deathbed – is all wrong.
At the end of your life, you're not going to look back on all of the things that you did and say, "My life is complete because of all of these things that I did."
You're going to look back on your life and say, "I feel gratitude for the experience of living. I am proud of what I accomplished, I am fulfilled by the legacy I am leaving behind. My life is complete."
Catch the difference?
It is not about what you do in life that matters, it is about how you feel doing it.
Beneath the goals of "getting fit" or "building a million-dollar business" are really the questions of "Who do I want to be?" and "How do I want to feel?" Clear even says that in his book, to make a habit stick, you have to tie it to the idea of who you are as a person. "I am a person who exercises," he would say, but I'm focused less on the doing and more on the being.
Why be anything when there is so much to do? The tyrant goads.
Doing masks the real truth of living, which is being. You want to be happy, so you do something to make yourself happy. But being is the shortcut. You don't need to do anything to feel a certain way, you can just feel. Emotions are created internally, not externally, though most of us hitch our wagons to external events as though we're powerless to the feelings.
"But exercising makes me feel good," you say, and that's true, to an extent, exercise does release endorphins. But most of the "feeling good" is actually the way that you perceive yourself in your mind because you exercised. You have decided that exercise is a prerequisite to feeling good about yourself when you could just feel good about yourself.
It's a lot easier said than done. Perhaps because you can't exactly "do" being. It's a way of moving through life, one that I haven't quite mastered yet, though I'm 99.99% sure that my health depends on it.
After I came to this realization, I did, in the end, make goals for this year, many of which you'll get to see unfold in this community. I am a doer, after all.
But I also set an intention for how I want this year to feel, because to be perfectly honest, even though I wrote a book and jumped out of a plane and hiked in the Himalayas, 2024 didn't actually feel all that good.
At the end of your life, what you're really looking back on is how everything you've experienced on this planet made you feel.
Death is the absence of feeling, and that's why it is what we must process before we let go. If we carry any memory of this lifetime into wherever we go next, it is in how we felt about it, and the people we met along the way.
So what's my "feeling" word for the year?
Ease.
"You don't want to learn about it, you just want to step back, let it unfold and take it all in." -Brené Brown, on the feeling of "awe"
Ease is the gateway to gratitude and awe. Ease is surrender, and trust, and from that place of safety you can observe life with wonder and appreciation.
Ease is not to be confused with easy. Life isn't going to be easy, but I want to feel ease in my body nonetheless. I want to let life be life, and I want to feel a soft peace as the experiences flow through me. Because you know what's the opposite of ease?
Disease.
And I'm not going back to where I started.
