So you’ve got this piece of sand that you’ve been sitting on…this piece of sand that you’re trying to decide whether it would be better to just let it rub you raw…or to figure out how to turn it  into a pearl.

On New Year’s Day, we are desperate to suddenly develop the ability to turn it into a pearl.

All the rest of the year-long, we’ll complain about the worn patch.  We could brush it off…move to a different chair…but it’s easy to say that something’s chafing us and just let it ride.  We are sitting on something we can hardly see and it’s driving us crazy.

In the beginning, it wasn’t like this.  In the beginning, we said “hmmmm…..scratchy”.  Later on it might have been, “What the heck?  What’s wrong with this chair?”.

By the time New Year’s rolls along we’re screaming in discomfort ( low pain threshold, you know)….yelling about how “some changes gonna be made!” even if we don’t really understand the problem.

If we’re either really brave…or really close to the person we are questioning….we might ask, “Do you see this raw place on my behind?  Do you think it’s a rash?  Where do you suppose it came from?”  They’ll try to look away, maybe….or burrow in and bring out the magnifying glass.  It’s easier to see the problem on someone else’s behind.

So maybe you get an answer to your question….”Oh…that’s bad…you should do something about that”. So you smear the creme…cry a little…back up to the mirror for a second self-obsessed look…and then go sit back down in your favorite chair to ponder how things are going to be different now that you’ve identified the result of the problem.

But in spite of the creme and the soothing words, that chair still just doesn’t feel right.

Now it’s New Year’s Eve…and you bandage and sooth your posterior and go out into the world to change it.

You tell yourself, “I resolve…I resolve….I resolve that in the coming year, I will work at feeling better.”

Mission accomplished…sooth your soul….you made the effort, stayed the course, you’re right on track…you made a RESOLUTION.

Now what?

It is a real bugger to find a piece of sand in an easy chair. It’s work to clean and vacuum up the irritation. It’s a lot easier to just keep smearing on the creme.

If the darn chair wasn’t my established favorite, I might just move to another one and solve the problem…even if I never understood the trouble, this might be a solution.  I suspect that sooner or later, though, I would be right back in it…it’s my favorite, after all.

We can’t understand the deeper issues.  We don’t look for the “sand in our chairs”.  Maybe it’s time to go to Costco and buy a barrel of creme.

Ring in the New Year.  All hail RESOLUTIONS!