This Year, Choose Abundance

Some Thoughts on New Year's Resolutions, Part 1

Note: This is the first of two posts on New Year’s resolutions. You can read the second post, “A Tale of Two Toasters,” here.

When you think about it, our approach to New Year’s resolutions is really strange. Of all the imaginable ways we could resolve to do better, why do we so often limit ourselves to improving our own health? And why are our health resolutions so often to give up something we enjoy? We vow to limit coffee and to eliminate desserts, red meat, dairy, fat, sugar, salt, carbs, and alcohol. We replace perfectly unobjectionable foods with wretched, Lenten substitutes, to wit those recipes for cauliflower “pizza crust,” “rice,” and—most preposterous of all—“steak.” Stay in your lane, cauliflower! Or, if we do add something to our lives, it’s often unpleasant or strenuous. We join a gym, adopt a regimen, hoist weights, and consume raw vegetables and other antioxidant-laden superfoods. We embark on diet and exercise programs in the vain hope that we will lose weight.

Cartoon by Kaamran Hafeez for the New Yorker. Published with an education and personal license purchased through CartoonStock.com.

This is a crabbed and joyless approach to New Year’s resolutions. Besides, there is no rule that resolutions should always be to improve our health, and still less does it make sense for us to assume that that improvement requires sacrifice and suffering.

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Of course, to quote Seinfeld, “not that there’s anything wrong with that!” As a vegetarian, I fully endorse choosing to eat less meat. Dry January provides a welcome pushback against our culture’s pressure to consume alcohol at every opportunity. And if a New Year’s resolution gets you to quit smoking, more power to you! But these points aside, when we make New Year’s resolutions about our own health to the exclusion of everything else, we err in two ways: We are misguided about what is truly healthy on the one hand, and we can become excessively focused on ourselves on the other. We can solve both of these problems by resolving to choose abundance this year.

What If All This Sacrifice Is for Nothing?

In fact, all this dismal abstemiousness is often futile. As just one example, doctors are finally admitting that full-fat dairy products not only taste infinitely better than the thin gruel of nonfat, but are in fact also better for us. As a lifelong lover and unapologetic consumer of butter and cheese, I feel vindicated! And we all know about health authorities’ vacillations about eggs. Who can even keep track anymore? A top-recommended commenter to a recent New York Times article on New Year’s nutrition tips shares some wisdom:

More and more we are discovering that the real risk to our mental and physical health is not the occasional indulgence or deviation from the path of virtue. It’s loneliness. The Netflix series Blue Zones illustrates this point. Blue zones are areas of the world—for example Okinawa Prefecture, Japan; Icaria, Greece; and Albert Lea, Minnesota—where people enjoy extraordinarily long and healthy lives. These valetudinarians don’t live the way that articles on health and nutrition tell us we should. They enjoy a glass of wine with a hearty dinner, and not a one of them chokes down scoops of turmeric or cinnamon, nor do they strew pomegranate or flax seeds (or whatever the magic health food du jour is) over everything. While Blue Zoners are all physically active in their daily lives, they don’t punish themselves on the treadmill or obey the commands of personal trainers. Overwhelmingly, these folks’ secret is that they are active and valued members of their communities.

Host an Apéro

If we want to improve our health, instead of denying ourselves pleasures, we ought to try the best medicine—spending time with other people, perhaps by inviting friends over for an apéro. An apéro is just a fancy European name for a small pre-dinner party. People love hosting apéros in Switzerland. It’s a holiday? Apéro. It’s someone’s birthday? Apéro. Just because? Apéro.¹ The beauty of an apéro is twofold: First, they take place in the early evening—usually from 5 to 7pm—so guests have plenty of time to get to their dinner reservation or concert (or to lounge on the sofa with a good book or favorite show) afterwards. For an introvert like me, an apéro is just the right length for a party. And even better, hosting an apéro doesn’t require a lot of fuss. No need to bring out the fine linens or haul table leaves and extra chairs up from the basement. You just put some plates and napkins next to cheese and crackers and some nice dips,² uncork the wine and set up a couple of nonalcoholic options, and Bob’s your uncle.

Photo by Natalie Behn on Unsplash.

Cleanup is a snap too. There are no pots and pans to scrub, so you can quickly load the dishwasher before bedtime instead of stumbling into a chaotic kitchen the next morning.

Every year (except during Covid), our lovely upstairs neighbor,³ Annemarie, invites everyone in our building over for a holiday apéro. We are quite a varied group! This time around, there were a dozen of us, ranging in age from seventeen to eighty. We come from countries on four continents—India, Ivory Coast, Switzerland, the US, and Vietnam—and we follow four religions. One neighbor speaks only German, another is a French-speaker who speaks no German or English, and one of us speaks only English. Somehow we muddled along, helped by patience, gesticulation, lots of laughter, and a couple of multilingual members of the party.⁴ There is no finer intervention for our health and happiness than parties with our neighbors. As we talk with people whom we might have thought were different from us, we discover that we have a lot in common!

Use Your Opera Voice

When my kids were in elementary school, I ran a number of programs for the school, and sometimes when the kids got rambunctious,⁵ I would threaten to use my Opera Voice on them. I am a classically-trained mezzo-soprano, and my high notes are LOUD. Turns out that this was not the dire threat I thought it was, and in fact the kids loved hearing the Opera Voice. It got so that every time I showed up at school they would clamor to hear it first thing.

The previous paragraph is not a digression. My point is that we all have interests and talents—something special about us that we can share. Sometimes we get so busy that we neglect those talents, but too often we quit because we worry that our hobbies are a waste of time or will annoy other people. We may fear that our fascination with, say, wolves, dinosaurs, mountains, or Russian poetry (yes, these are examples from my family) could make us seem nerdy or weird. But if we offer to share our interests, more often than not we will discover that other people are eager to learn from us and grateful for our contributions. The traits that make us unique, be they an Opera Voice or anything else, connect us with other people. For example, last year, my son, who loves to cook, made a New Year’s resolution to master ten dishes.⁶ Even better, all year long he shared his creations with friends and family, including his grandma when she was recovering from surgery. This is the kind of New Year’s resolution that improves the world rather than just our waistlines.

In my case, that interest is singing. Annemarie mentioned at her holiday party that she had heard what she thought was opera coming from our apartment. Guilty as charged! I was listening to the Messiah, got carried away, and sang along (and not sotto voce) to “O Thou That Tellest Good Tidings to Zion.” Before we continue, let’s all take a moment to enjoy a playful and effortless performance of the aria by my favorite mezzo-soprano, Anne Sofie von Otter:

Wasn’t that delightful?

Anyway, I apologized profusely to my neighbors for disturbing them. In fact, in the five years we have lived in Switzerland, I have hardly ever sung in the apartment because of worries about noise. Switzerland is, after all, famous for valuing peace and quiet, to the extent that we aren’t supposed to do laundry or yard work at lunchtime or on Sundays for fear of interrupting someone’s nap. So imagine my surprise when my neighbors urged me to keep singing and even said that they looked forward to hearing more music from me.

Readers, what is something you are especially good at? What is your interest or talent that you can offer the world? Have you been tiptoeing around and hushing yourself in a misguided concern for others, as I have been doing with my singing? Have you been shrinking yourself in some way, because you are worried that you are too much, or that you will step on toes, or that you will look foolish? Other people are not Archie Bunker telling us to stifle ourselves. The world needs us to share our special gifts, quirky enthusiasms, and great big voices.

When my daughter was little, she liked to dream up imaginary creatures. I was quite taken with her description of a primordial plant emerging in spring: “Then, curled up leaves under its bulb will unfurl.” And that’s my wish for all of us this year: Let whatever is curled up in us unfurl!

An alpine thistle unfurls. This bizarre flower unabashedly blooms in rocky soil above 2600m/8500ft to the delight of weary hikers. It is a role model for us all!

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How about you, readers? What can you do to choose abundance this year? What will you unfurl? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

The Tidbit

My son shared this adorable video with me, and now I’m sharing it with you all. Oscar the beagle shows us the way: Go ahead and dream of rabbits, slurp noisily, whine melodramatically, snort dismayedly, and maybe even let loose an attention-seeking bark!

1. Here is an informative article about the tradition that features a recipe for an Apérol spritz.

2. If you would like some quick and easy ideas for dips for your own apéro, here are my recipes for hummus and guacamole.

3. I have used the phrase “our lovely upstairs neighbor” to describe Annemarie so often that it has almost become a Homeric epithet for her.

4. I managed, for the first time ever, to have a friendly conversation, in German, with Herr Trösch, the very shy denizen of the basement apartment. We bonded over our irritation at being woken up at 5am every day by the shrieks of some wild critter, possibly a pine marten—although Herr Trösch hypothesized, chuckling, that the animal could have been a Tasmanian devil. Amazingly, one of the few things he knows how to say in English is “Tasmanian devil.”

5. For example, the first time I resorted to the Opera Voice was the day I “taught” all the kids in grades 3–5 to make homemade ice cream. In retrospect it was not the best idea to unleash a couple hundred kids in the gym with limited adult supervision but unlimited Ziploc baggies, ice, rock salt, sugar, vanilla, and cream. The Fall of Saigon came to mind.

6. Jollof rice, chicken paprikash, chicken tikka masala, chana masala, mushroom risotto, beet and goat cheese risotto, sausage risotto, vegan paella, chicken paella, and kadai chicken.