Need Help With January Resolutions? Don't Go It Alone.

“In the beginning….” --Genesis 1:1 and John 1:1

I finally went back to the gym last week.  It’s about time. I’ve been paying $19 a month to the Planet Fitness Gym in the next town over for so long that I’ve singlehandedly paid for the college tuition of the gym owner’s three children. Their braces too.

Ok. I exaggerate.

But for something like 15 years I’ve been sending that nationwide chain of training facilities almost twenty bucks every thirty days. That’s $3500 to pay and then not use any of the treadmills or stationary bikes or weight machines there. I know why I keep up that membership. It’s on the rare chance I will go beyond a hope-filled but most often doomed effort to get back in shape post January 1^st . 

For so many years, it goes like this.

In a fit of new year’s optimism and earnestness I resolve to go to Plant Fitness at least four times a week. Then about mid-February, on a chilly windblown afternoon, as I prepare to drive over to the gym in my ice-cold car, in the dark, in sweats that barely keep me toasty, my resolution stumbles and then it’s back to the couch for me, and my gym bag sits in a corner of my bedroom collecting dust.

Perhaps you dear readers have faced such defeats. We humans make a beginning at something, a start, a resolve to take up this new hobby or that new pastime, this new lifestyle change or that professional pursuit and then we stumble. We aren’t able to keep at it. To follow through. To make the change. To give up a vice. To start a new routine. To get back into the dating scene or to save more money for a rainy day or eat less or exercise more. To quit drinking or smoking or using pot. To go back to church. To pray each morning.

Making changes in life is hard. Sometimes very hard.  Our well-loved habits, especially the ones that bring us the most pleasure and stimulate the pleasure centers of our brains—these impulses are often the most difficult to curb.  One study from a Yale University researcher estimates it takes a full ninety days to end an old habit and begin a new habit. In Alcoholics Anonymous, newcomers are often advised to do “90 in 90”.  That’s 90 meetings, one a day, for three full months. And don’t drink. The longer we stick to something new and eschew something old,  the greater our chance at success.  

But the most important spiritual lesson I’ve learned in the many January beginnings I’ve tried in my 63 years, is that I cannot do this work alone. I can’t quit solo. I can’t get in shape on my own. I can’t go this life alone, tough it out all by myself. For me to change I need help from others. People to keep me accountable. Call me out in love if I go back to a bad habit. Folks who love me so much that they don’t want me to return to my old unhealthy ways. I need help from folks who struggle just like I do with addictions.

If I ever decide to go back to cigarette smoking, a nasty and dangerous addiction I struggled with for almost four decades, my friends and family will kill me. Not actually take my life but they would be so angry, hurt, and worried for me and so let down. In the rare moments I want a cigarette (yes even two years after my last Marlboro Red) I remember all the people I need to stay alive for now. For my nieces and my God kids and the people I serve at church and folks in the choir I sing with my cycling team and my mom and siblings and friends and so many others. I let someone I trust that I had a craving. By being honest, the power of jonesing for a cancer stick loses some of its power.

Want to change your life? Ask another for help. Recovering addicts in 12 Step groups know the power of this truth. So do support group members, running buddies and hiking partners and anyone who enjoys living life in community. It can be as simple as you and your dog going on a walk together knowing you each need one another. Or training for a marathon with crazy folks who’ll run on a frozen January morning. Sitting in a church basement packed with people and  saying out loud for the very first time, “My name is Bill and I’m an alcoholic and an addict.”  

Because finally, to begin, to begin again, to begin for the first or thousandth time, we need others. We need our God, a Higher Power of our choosing, to come to us most powerfully through the help of fellow human beings and children of God.

In the beginning…what are you starting or ending or beginning these days? My advice is simple. Ask for help from another. Ask for help from God.  

And maybe I’ll see you at the gym.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.