Good Morning and Happy New Year everyone. I’m glad to be back in the saddle, and hope that I can spend 2022 offering some advice and Godly wisdom to anyone that needs it. I do greatly appreciate the few of you who reached out and either mentioned my writings, or asked if I was done. I do write for myself more than anyone else, but no human is without that tiny glimmer of hope inside that someone, somewhere benefits from hearing from us. So thank you, you all made my weeks.
The reality is that if you have a sales based job, your life exists as a monkey navigated, rocket powered, sleigh ride of doom blasting across the Alkali flats about 6 weeks out of the year. That was the last six weeks for us. So I could either do both a blog, and my job badly, or I could honor God’s command and take care of my family first. I chose the second.
That being said, for the vast majority of America, it is now the New Year, and I might have spotted yet another victim of the Eternal Now that is Covid. I think New Years resolutions died. I follow a decent number of people on Twitter, and I observe countless more through the lense of corporate advertising. The amount of New Years resolutions has fallen off a cliff since time stopped in 2020. The only people I see even mentioning them are gurus setting you up for their click funnel of courses.
Walmart and Target and the other retailers are moving the scales, weights and vitamins up to the front of the store, but the language around it is pretty flat. Even Planet Fitness, which tries to get my money back every 8 seconds hasn’t used that language in their email campaigns yet.
On a big level, it seriously feels like some spark has gone out of Mankind, at least the American branch. I spent a LOT of time in stores over the Christmas run. Even here in Texas, where the shadow rests lightly on the land, it felt forced. No one was joyous, and no one was heaping high the trappings of materialism either. I’ve seen empty people cope with Christmas for 20 years in and around retail. This wasn’t it.
So now we exist in the eternal, interminable NOW. Time never advances, God merely raises and lowers the temperature in the waiting room. Sometimes it snows, sometimes it rains, but we just sit and wait for the other shoe to drop. I admit, I fell victim to this spell in early 2020 myself. I was so flabbergasted by what was happening, my brain and spirit over loaded for a couple months. It didn’t help that my gym was taken away, which as a functional addict I was using to sublimate one urge for another. Harder to think about sex when you’ve worn your body to a nub in the gym. Eventually, through the grace of God and a good wife, I snapped out of it, and everything since then has been making hay while the sun shines. I don’t think that most people are that lucky though. Most people still feel like they are waiting for something they can’t articulate, and merely rush through each day hoping that tomorrow will be the key. Tomorrow never comes though.
So what does that have to do with New Year’s resolutions?
Their lack is, I believe, a symptom of The Great Wait. It’s become cliche in recent years to dump on resolutions. Gurus will be all “What, you need to wait till January to change your life?”. Well no, you don’t NEED to wait till January, and you shouldn’t. I’m a fan of the Gary Vee thought process on this though. Don’t wait for January, if you have an idea to change your life on June 26th, make a June 26th resolution and change your life. If though, like all of humanity, you feel the lull in the dark days between the birth of Christ and the changing of the year, and you use that time to rest, reflect, pray and introspect, and you come up with a good idea to make yourself better, THEN DO IT. No one should ever dump on someone else for resolving to make themselves better. Can you imagine a bro coming up and saying “I’m going to do No Nut November” and then other bro goes “Pussy, why’d you wait till November?”. Those words would never come out, because we respect the sacrifice.
I have a theory on what happened though. I think, that through all this haze of fear and pain that’s being ginned up by the demons that run the media, they made a critical error. They broke the facade. I think a lot of people suffering from The Great Wait because they realized all the old goal posts they used to measure success are absolutely meaningless. Big houses don’t matter when they are empty. The fancy car is pointless with no where to go. The stock portfolio is all fake. The fancy restaurants are stupid with no light and laughter of friends. Even then, most of your friends weren’t friends, they were just people you worked with. If your friends didn’t break gathering rules to come hang with you, that’s not a friend. Don’t worry, I don’t have any either, just the one I married.
New Years resolutions were used as a sacrament ritual to gain acceptance from the Façade. You resolve to lose 10 pounds so your co workers will respect you more (note, I support weight loss goals, but the reason behind it matters). You resolve to get that promotion. Buy that car. Do that thing that gives you value in someone else’s eyes. Now that the façade has cracked, its all wind and ghosts blowing the ashes of your old dreams back in your eyes. To steal a second thought from Vee, Regret is Poison.
Millions of people in our country are suffering from regret. They are now face to face with everything they passed over in exchange for winning the biggest pile of façade points. They traded love for beer with the boys. They traded satisfaction for the corner office. They traded spiritual meaning with keeping up with every season of whatever the hell Betty White last acted in.
The trads have started asking “Why can’t we have Cathedrals anymore?” The answer is simple, because we’ve lost what matters. You can’t build a cathedral because it doesn’t generate 15% annual growth. You can’t build a Cathedral cause it might cut into your meditation and ball sunning time. You can’t build a Cathedral because your promised candidate would rather have you building a wall or a high density housing complex. You can’t build a Cathedral because you filled your ears with the dreams of the Façade. You can no longer see beyond this world, and that harsh, flat, grey existence is poison for your soul.
So I beg you Brothers and Sisters in Christ, make a goal this year. Change something. Don’t suffer from regret at the end of it. Your Father loved you enough to be born to this Earth, and to feel all it’s suffering and pain as a man to redeem you. You get ONE run through here to glorify his name. Do something this year besides spend it waiting on the Façade to matter again. It never will. Come what may in 2022, it will never go back.