New Year’s resolutions get a bad rap.1 So many of them are impossible to achieve and so many of them are centered around our society’s constant need to produce, improve, and fit an ever-changing mold of perfection.
But nevertheless, I love them.
I love using the hibernation season of winter to contemplate the kind of person I want to be this year. I love building a plan around flourishing and what steps I can take to become a little more of that person.
This year I bought an overpriced planner that guided me to set themes and habits for my year.
For the first quarter of the year I have been emphasizing a theme of pause. In January my habit to practice was “pause before spending,” February is “pause before consuming,” and March is “pause before scrolling” (my Mt. Everest of pausing).
I am highly prone to retail therapy. The journey from having a feeling (like just literally any feeling), to wanting something, to opening my phone, to adding to cart, and to having it shipped to me is often a short one. And I take this journey far too often for someone in my tax bracket.
As I’ve been intentionally practicing pause I’ve learned a lot about my spending habits. I have been thinking about what I want, why I want it, and what value it brings to my life. And I have been letting items sit in the cart for a few days.
I learned that buying certain things at certain times has become a habit for me.
I learned that I have a tendency to buy things that solve an immediate felt need without taking the time to consider what I already have because it’s just easier.
I learned that my shopping is heavily tied to some anxieties that I have about maintaining connections and “fitting in.”
And it got me thinking about what else pause could bring into my life. into my world.
Pause is the path to possibility.
Humans are highly vulnerable to inertia. Once we’re going in a particular way, we’re going to keep going that way. Our neuropathways are going to keep wandering down the path of least resistance, the paths we carved before, without questioning why we’re going that way.
When we develop a habit, something we do almost instinctually, it becomes so difficult to stop or reverse it. And it’s equally hard to pick up a new habit. This is true from the cellular to the cosmic.
That’s why we have a hard time with those resolutions.
But I am learning that pausing disrupts this process and forces me to imagine a different way.
In regard to my spending, I have started asking new questions:
“Has my experience with this item/experience been good?”
“Do I already have something similar to this or something that would meet this need? Should I go look?”
“Will I still want this tomorrow? Next week?”
“Would a more confident version of myself buy this?”
And in just a month this has changed my spending dramatically. I’m mostly discovering that if I take a moment to think critically about my motivations and my opportunities, I will find a better way that I haven’t thought of, a better way that didn’t register in my calcified neuropathways.
And I think about what it would be like to scale my process. What would it look like for families, communities, businesses, churches, governments to pause?
The systems that sustain our society are rarely questioned. Because questioning, re-imagining, experimenting, and change-making are all processes that take time, and time is a resource that few of us have to spare (or so we think).
And so we settle for the way things are, continuing on the hamster wheel because the hamster wheel is what we know.
But a lot of what we know sucks.
The hamster wheel is not working for most people in our world.
In the US, the way that capitalism is working is creating inflation, high prices, and low quality products for most people; the two-party political system is creating division and disappointment for most people; the way justice is served is creating inescapable cycles for most people, especially non-White people; the way we operate in other countries and use our military budget to fund violent action is not working for most people. It’s not moving most people toward the good life.
But we settle for “that’s just the way it is,” because it’s “too complicated” and “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
But with this mindset there will be no change, we will continue to be frustrated, we will continue to spend more money, and innocent people will continue to die because we decided that a good and livable world was too time-consuming and too complicated for us to pursue.
But if we don’t make time for creating a better world, then what are we making time for? We certainly make time for keeping things the way they are, often at our own expense.
We spend a lot of time putting out fires, but the fires are going to keep raging — and burn us up in the process — if we don’t step back and pause to ask how they are starting.
We are never going to wake up one morning and find that poverty has become less complicated, problems with leadership structures have become less complicated, or the relationship between Israel and Palestine has become less complicated.
Our world is complicated. But it’s our world nonetheless.
What could be possible if we paused? What could be possible if we asked questions of the systems in which we’re operating? What could be possible if we imagined something different? What could be possible if we walked a different way?
Maybe we save a little money. Maybe thousands upon thousands of people stay alive and live in peace. We’ll never know until we change. We will never change until we pause.
Maybe world-changing is more complex than me denying my desire to buy a new outfit, but what if it’s not?
Has my experience with this policy been good? Why do I care about it? Does this policy affect me at all? Who does it affect?
Has my experience with this church been good? Have I become a better person because of it? Have I become a better neighbor because of it? How do I know?
Is there a justice system in our history, in other countries, or in our neighborhoods that’s actually making the world safer? How could we start implementing it?
Is this lifestyle going to be good for me next year? Is this work schedule going to be good for me and my family in 5 years? Is this board decision going to be good for those who fill my position once I’m gone? Is this policy going to be good for my grandchildren and their neighbors?
Would someone who truly loved their neighbors do this? buy this? promote this idea? believe this?
Would someone who believes in a better world live the way that I’m living?
I think we (individually and collectively) should all be asking questions of ourselves every so often. The answers will often be uncomfortable for us.
It may mean we need to make some major changes, but I think, more often, the uncomfortable answers will invite us to think about how we can make small changes in our daily lives and in our circles of influence so that we can collectively become more loving, more peaceful, more neighborly, and more abundant.
I think a lot about Nasra, a woman I met in Tanzania who I’ve written about before. She is a real person, facing real obstacles against a history of real marginalization.
Because of systems in place in her society, Nasra never learned to read or write. She never learned the skills essential to running a business, but she also desperately needed to make money. She didn’t see a path ahead for her that did not involve perpetuating a system where women are seen as property and values need to be compromised in order to survive.
But she attended a training connected to Flint that taught her to pause and ask:
What if I could support myself?
What if I could make a business work?
What could the most empowered version of myself learn to do?
What would that look like?
And she did it. She started a small business and learned how to keep records without writing. She made a profit, so much so that she was able to loan some to her friend Shakira so that another woman could also break out of these systems that held them back.
Now Nasra has moved out of her parents’ house and can support herself in a way that she feels good about — and she can pave a way for others to walk behind her. All because she took the time to pause, consider what’s possible, and practice that possibility.
Nasra’s life probably looks quite different from most people reading this. But not that different.
We all take the path of least resistance, continue in our patterns, and rarely take time to question the goodness of those patterns or what else could be done. We tell ourselves that nothing can be done.
But Nasra did it. Nasra walked a new way. She didn’t overhaul society, solve every problem, or do anything monumental. She took small steps outside what was expected, walking toward a different sort of society where she could flourish, and she brought her friend along with her. She sells cabbages. Small, revolutionary cabbages.
We can all do that. We can all pause. We can all imagine new possibilities. We can all make small changes.
And when we all make small changes, they’re not so small anymore.
Questions, cabbages, and calls for ceasefire.
That is how the new world gets made, if we just pause for a moment to build it.
If you’re interested in work that’s inviting people to pause and consider a different future, click here to learn more about what I do at Flint Global. For more information or to set up a meeting you can email me at jessicamarkwood@flintglobal.org .
I googled to confirm whether it was bad rap or bad rep and found much joy in Merriam Webster’s definition: Bad rap is the original phrase meaning "a bad or undeserved reputation." Bad rep, which contains the literal shortening of "reputation," has historically been interpreted as a spelling error, but has seen enough usage to merit entry. Bad wrap is considered wrong and is best saved for referring to wraps and tortillas.