Sometimes in December’s darker days, I am haunted by New Year’s resolutions that I failed to keep.
I don’t think I’m alone. Surveys indicate that over 90 percent of people making resolutions give up on them by the year’s end. My own multiple, unrealized resolutions have been piling up over the years, and my time for renewing or replacing them is running short.
Which led me to one of life’s more vexing questions: why does God or Fate or some perverse Trickster infuse us with intentions, dreams and ambitions we find impossible to consummate?
As another new year commences in 2025, I believe each of us may find an answer by looking back at the failures.
The first resolution I ever made, for example, was to become a Franciscan priest, which, in retrospect, was an ill-considered decision for two reasons: First, I was only 13 years old; second, my motivation was not to humbly serve God but to save my own hide from a Dickensian childhood of petty theft and general sinfulness. After three years at a seminary on a tightly regulated, closed campus — long periods of mandatory prayer and silence, no radios or telephones, strict limits on visitors and TVs, Mass every day and twice on Sunday — I figured that time served was ample retribution for my misspent youth, and I busted out at 16.
In 1968, when I was a freshman in college, I resolved to major in marine biology, since, after all, I loved rivers and the ocean and fishing and boating. Why not make my living in the same habitat as my favorite pastimes? How was I to know, however, that the subject required the study and mastery of mitosis, photosynthesis, chemical equations and dead fetal pigs soaking in formaldehyde, whose putrid essence never failed to trigger my gag reflex.
Instead, I would join the Navy to see the world and live aboard a ship, satisfy my wonderment and love for the sea, and experience the kind of ecstasy manifested by Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly, singing and dancing their way as sailors through the classic 1949 film On the Town.
My short-lived “anchors aweigh” plan ended when I fell hopelessly in love with a fellow student in my German class and could not fathom separation from the object of my adoration for a single day, let alone an entire year of close confinement with hundreds of men under strict military discipline. The Navy was out, especially once I realized that Sinatra and Kelly were deliriously happy precisely because they were on shore leave.
Therefore, in 1970, I vowed to trade in my aborted resolution of a career of conformity in the military for the wild ride of freedom as a rock star. It was a total surprise, as I had previously been only half-serious about music, trepidatiously lugging my guitar to Ali’s Coffee House on Chicago’s south side on open mic night. Ascending the stage to cover a song by Simon and Garfunkel, I was shaking. But the nervousness in my voice rendered it dramatically plaintive, its timbre sincere, silencing every cough, every whisper, every scraping chair. The audience surrendered, giving me a gift of love I had never felt before.
Half a dozen non-paying gigs later, reality set in, coupled with my awareness that my siblings Charlie, Jimmy, Pat, Nancy and Rosie, in addition to my friends Steve, Tom, John, Ron, Sonny, and “Tomates” were also caught up in Beatles-driven guitar-mania and working their own individual ways toward rock stardom. The field was overcrowded, my chances slim and none. My high school buddy Steve Doerr, front man for the LeRoi Brothers, was the only one to beat the odds.
Later, in a 1978 snowstorm, as I sheltered in our Evergreen Park basement carving fishing lures out of balsa wood, I made a hell-or-high-water resolution to become a professional tournament fisherman. I had joined teammates Tom Booth and Mike Michau to win the $700 ($3,389.03 in today’s dollars) first prize in a local tournament at Lake Clinton in southern Illinois the previous November.
At another tournament in Wisconsin the following spring, I endured an all-day headache while working the water for 18 hours, only for us to lose to two nefarious characters with a cooler full of dead fish which they claimed to have caught at a secret lake nearby. I decided to take early retirement from cutthroat competitive fishing that drained all joy and purity from the erstwhile purest sport.
Ringing in the New Year in 1985, I entertained a resolution to exit a career as a city high school English teacher (also known as an unarmed cop) to seek adventure and autonomy as a newspaper reporter. Then the Daily Calumet editor cut the lead in my baseball story (“Dust wheels rolled like tumbleweed across the infield at Stony Island Park”), ordering me to stick to balls and strikes, and runs, hits and errors. I finally understood why reporters in the movies are invariably portrayed as hard drinking cynics with depressive personalities.
Reversing field, I leaned into literature and writing, made it my life instead of my job. All these years later, as January 1, 2025 approaches, I am as happy as a native of Bhutan, self-proclaimed “Kingdom of Happiness.” I feel sublimely content as an emeritus professor, outdoors writer, freelance columnist and partner in a lifetime adventure with my wife, Marianne.
Never would I have achieved my current state of felicity without my failed resolutions over the decades. I backpedaled and learned and adjusted my direction.
The answer, therefore, to the aforementioned question about doomed resolutions: never stop making them. For the most fulfilling gains in life come not from just what you succeed in, but from everything that you try.
Contributing editor for Florida Sportsman magazine, David McGrath is author of Far Enough Away, a collection of his work. McGrath’s “His Intimacies with Lake and Stream,” published in this magazine, was cited in the The Best American Essays 2022. Email him at mcgrathd@dupage.edu.