KEY POINTS

• When our resolutions are for improving our own lives, do they do any good for the rest of society?
• Four years after the pandemic start, it's past time to reopen concern for the rest of the world.
• What's the difference between a resolution and a commitment, and what does it take to keep yours?

However we calculate a new beginning, we’re culturally conditioned to mark the New Year on January 1 with a firm resolve to make a firm resolve: To give up the things that are bad for us and take up the ones that are good; to cultivate the latter and abjure the former; to be the best version of ourselves we can be, or at least a better one. To be kind and loving and generous and patient, as soon as we get over that New Year's Eve hangover.

However firm our resolve feels, it isn't, really, unless we make it a commitment, not a vague intention. For me, this year, my resolution is to think before I open my mouth. If I could manage that it would make all those other things enumerated above easier (except giving up dessert).

Speaking before thinking usually means interrupting someone, cutting them off, feeling like what you have to say is so important it can't wait for the other person to finish their sentence or even their thought. When I do it, my friend Kate pantomimes that annoying little girl in third grade who’s always waving her hand in the teacher's face, needing to be the first to speak.

So this year my resolution means waiting to speak until I'm sure I'm not interrupting, that the speaker has finished her sentence or her thought before I open my mouth. The upside of doing that is listening more closely to people rather than composing my next remark in my head and waiting for a pause before I forget what mine was.

This year I’m making resolutions to improve my community, neighborhood or the lives and circumstances of other people rather than focus on my own failures or shortcomings. Sometimes it’s a donation of goods, services or cash, other times it’s just a smile of acknowledgment or a cheerful hello or happy holidays to the familiar strangers I see often in my apartment building, at the bus stop or the post office or in the coffee shop.

Oh, sure, I’ll pay lip service to resolutions I routinely make at the end of December—, from giving up carbs to going to the gym more than once a week to paying my bills the day they come in instead of letting them pile up in my junk drawer until I’m warned that my heat or my credit cards or car insurance is about to be invalidated.

This month I’m signing myself up for the volunteer commitments I gave up during the pandemic—working at the food bank, doorbelling on behalf of candidates or causes that can make a real difference in the quality of life of those with no voice in the circumstances of their own, driving my neighbors to doctor appointments, tutoring at-risk kids after school. Realizing that the pandemic began almost four years ago brings me up short when I consider how many of those activities I used to pursue regularly and no longer do. In many ways, the pandemic narrowed my focus; mostly I paid attention only to myself and those close friends and family members whose health and well-being truly mattered to me.

What this New Year's means to me is a reopening of my obligations and commitments to the wider world I also live in. The hope expressed in the holiday greetings I offer to and accept from those close and distant who populate my life and the environment we coexist in is that all of us enlarge our ambitions for that world as well as for ourselves.