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It’s here. Another January. Specifically, the beginning-of-the-new-year-kind-of-January. The weight of this consternation causes me to stoop low under its burden. You see, this is the time when I face my regrets over the past twelve months. Wasn’t I supposed to be improved by now?

What happened to my resolve? After all, I had 365 days in which to pull myself up by my chin strap and get perfected. For reasons unclear to me, how in the world did I come up with the thousands of cockamamie excuses I’ve used to avoid my 2021 resolutions?

Don’t you remember a year ago when we were all full of puffed-up-virtuousness as we swore on a Reader Digest all the improvements we were about to make? Thinner, richer, smarter, nicer, fitter, better-writer-of-Herald-columns? The list goes goes on and on. Remember how self-righteous we felt when we made our lists? So full of good intent. Then for some inexplicable reason, by January 3rd, we had already forgotten those vows … or unconsciously consciously dropped them. Why is that? What’s wrong with us?

Nobody knows for sure why we get waylaid; how our aspirations collide with our resistance. (But, don’t you see! I truly love—and need!—Kerry Gold Irish Butter!) With the reminder of our deficiencies, our fizzling failures lay heavy upon our souls. And delving into such ponderous thoughts may, in the end, be actually too disturbing for us to handle.

More than anything, there should be a rule that January 1st be a day of compassionate calculated cleansing. A day of gently unburdening our flops; wiping clean our guilt slate in order to start nakedly afresh. Ironically we must do this so that we can repeat our failures all over again in the new year. It’s such a dispiriting bummer. Passing muster somehow just doesn’t seem to be our thing.

Additionally it would be a good thing to make January a time for us to practice our spelling … p-e-r-s-e-v-e-r-e.

The good news is that I, of the weak resolve, am here to help. The information I am about to share will surely guide you through your own 2022 resolution challenges. More than anything, it should shed some light onto just how reasonable and realistic New Year’s Resolutions truly are … Or aren’t.

Ponder this: the inventor of the treadmill died at the age of 54. The inventor of gymnastics died at the age of 57. The world bodybuilding champion died at the age of 41. The world’s best soccer player died at the age of 60.

See where I’m going with this?

And here’s something really scary: James Fuller Fixx, the man credited with helping to start America’s fitness revolution by popularizing the sport of running, died of a heart attack while jogging! at the age of 52.

Get out!

These statistics certainly beg the question of what are we doing? All this health stuff … what is it? I, for one, believe that if everyone would step out of their house and run to their farthest fitness center, then when they get there turn around and run back home, we wouldn’t need any fitness centers. We would wipe them and their membership fees clean off the face of the earth. It’s silly how logically logical this logic is.

In life, it is true that every fact has an opposing fact. Do we need examples? Yes, we do and here are some that will get you to thinking: the clogged-artery KFC Col. Sanders died at age 94, while the creator of the loaded saturated fat, Nutella, died at the age of 88.

And get this! The cigarette maker, Winston, met his maker at the age of 102! How did he do that? Think about it. If he, for Pete’s sake, began his pack-a-day weed addiction at age two, that would mean he had smoked roughly 37,230 packs. Yiiikes!

It is my hope that these factoids have enlightened you, as well as relieving you of future remorse. Bottom line: do not lambaste thyself. You are not living an ill spent life just because you failed again. And again. And then once more. Instead make sensible, do-able, judicious, sage, rational, credible, level-headed (shall I go on?) resolutions this year.

And now, having said that, can anyone tell me how—while eating Irish Kerry Gold—I can lose 20 pounds in two weeks?