Making New Year’s Resolutions is a Lot Like Herding Cats

Making New Year’s Resolutions Is A Lot Like Herding Cats By TOM GARRISON St. George, Utah It’s that time of year again. Holiday cheer mixed with excess—an abundance of rich food and drink, way too much money spent on gifts, perhaps a bit too much time spent with the slightly obnoxious Uncle Bob. In the post-Christmas doldrums, you swear to maintain a more even keel next year. Lucky for you there is a mechanism by which this can be attained—the New Year’s resolution. To increase the probability of success, consider the following guidelines. Making New Year’s resolutions is a lot like herding cats—both require patience and focus. Just when you believe you have the cats, or your thoughts, corralled, the large orange tabby—or a stray thought—bounds away after a wind-blown leaf. You can’t allow the tabby/stray thought to commence that stream of consciousness awareness wherein your focus becomes a tangled web. Stay on point and realize the task may take a while. Your cat herding and resolution making will both benefit. Both endeavors also require a healthy dose of decision-making agility. In making resolutions, one must possess the mental agility to realistically weigh the pros and cons of each potential course of action. Will external factors loom large? For example, can you count on your family being supportive for more than a week? Is this resolution doable, or you setting yourself up for failure? That decision must result from a balance between reality—a particular resolution is something you can do—and a calculation of your future will power. Will you do it? You must have the mental agility to assign realistic probabilities to each potential outcome. The trick is to make resolutions that challenge, yet are attainable. The same can be said for cat herding, with the additional requirement of physical agility. You know the small female tortoiseshell is feisty. Can you muster your decision-making and physical abilities regarding the tortie in such a way so as get her to comply with your decision? Can you distract her with a string and then physically move her into the herd? Perhaps, but differing personalities of each cat, and the troubling fact that they are not herd animals, demands you be at the top of your decision-making game. Each decision made and acted upon affects not only the cat in question, but all the others to some degree. Those cat reactions become input for your future decisions—a cascade of rapid-fire decision-making. Yes, cat herding demands extreme mental and physical agility. Finally, making resolutions and cat herding are not for the faint of heart. Participating in both activities demands you acknowledge the very real possibility of failure. If you are like most that make resolutions, you know from past experience that failure looms. A forgetful day or a senior moment can undermine the vestiges of will power to which you stubbornly cling. If you have ever owned a cat, or simply observed them from afar, you know the chances of herding them into a coherent group is slim—about the same as that truck and the goofy people with all the balloons from Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes arriving at your doorstep with a check for ten million dollars. Makers of resolutions do not despair. While the odds of adhering to your resolutions are similar to that of corralling a herd of cats, it can be done. Remember, it is the journey, the supreme effort that fulfills whether or not you attain your goal.