Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?

Happy New Year.

I don't particularly like the phrase, to tell you the truth. If the new year was meant to be happy, why would it begin with the futile downward spiral that is January?

And as for New Year's resolutions. Well, I don't believe in them.
I came to this conclusion after spending a few days reading Proverbs while doing cardio and eating celery sticks. "Why am I doing this to myself?" I thought. "What exactly am I trying to improve in myself?" I was lifting weights, but what for? My clothes don't fit anyway due to my abnormally developed sternum. If I work out, I'll have to buy new ones, and I can't afford them (because it is January). Besides, no matter how much I exercise, I will never be lithe nor limber. I will never have a torso long and lean like the Baja peninsula. I am destined to face the brutal winds of time like a monolithic, mesomorphic plinth. I am not willowy, nor wispy. My build suggests one who was made to walk against the current head on... not smile, sylph-like, while being carried with it. I do not consider the lillies of the field who neither toil nor spin. Clumsily, I mow them down. And move on.

This is what I was thinking when I was on the treadmill. And after I left the gym, I went and bought myself some blue cheese and went down by the ocean and gazed at the water and thought, maybe I do have a resolution. And it is this: I resolve not to resolve. I will be a series of contradictions all my life, and there is nothing I can do to escape from the body or the mind that I have been given. Pope John XXIII, who was not willowy either, said: "See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little". I like that.

And so I give thanks for the things that I have, and I give more thanks for the times I am free from wanting more than I have. And I give thanks for breath, and for bread and butter.

I give thanks for every second that I am alive.

Happy New Year.