New Year’s resolutions are easily made and even more easily abandoned. Yet only one is needed: to follow your own path in life, despite the difficulties this appears to offer. Anything else means either walking in your own footsteps — which must keep bringing you back to where you started — or trying to follow others who are headed for places you neither chose nor are likely to relish.

 
IMAGINE SOMEONE TRYING TO WALK THROUGH DEEP SNOW; I mean really deep, maybe three feet or so. It’s hard work. Slowly, this person pushes forward, carving a thin path where he or she has stepped. From time to time, rest is necessary, for the effort is draining.

In one of these rest breaks, our person looks back at the path behind. There’s still a lot of snow there, but it’s much less deep. If you walked back that way, the going would be easier.

That’s what the person does, retracing former steps, going back where they came from. And it is easier to walk, much easier. At the starting point, the person turns around again. Now the snow in the pathway they have made is even less deep, trampled down by two sets of tracks, going and coming back.

The person sets out again. Even easier. After several repeats, the snow path is reduced to a residue of hard-packed snow that it’s possible to walk on with only the occasional slip.

Other peoples’ paths

Of course, going backwards and forwards along a single path is easy, but it does become rather boring. So when our person finds someone else has crossed their pathway, making fresh tracks that veer off to the side, it seems like a good idea to follow for a while. That other person has done the really hard work of making a fresh path through the snow. Walking in their footsteps isn’t too difficult.

But that track goes where the other person wanted to go, and our walker decides he or she mustn’t stray too far from their own path way. They return, trampling down the new track nicely.

Now they have two paths: their own, original one, and the part of the other person’s track they were willing to follow.

As a few more unknown people cross their path, they carve out more tracks, each one moving away from their own path in a fresh direction — at least until they realize they are going too far from their chosen direction and turn back again.

In time, they are moving around a small network of trampled tracks. The going is easy, even if they are no longer heading anywhere in particular. These tracks feel safe and familiar. As still more snow falls, the areas outside this network become deeper and deeper — and harder and harder to push into.

Maybe our person tries once or twice to push again in their own direction, but the untouched snow is now four or even five feet deep and it feels nearly impossible to make any progress. So they turn back again; back to the familiar, well-trodden paths, where fresh snow is soon trampled over and they can move without much effort.

Hemming yourself in

In time, of course, even the extended network of well-trodden paths becomes stale. It’s like eating the same, once-favorite food for every meal. What was once a pleasure becomes wretched and nauseating. But moving outside these familiar pathways seems impossible. The snow has piled up to a point where pushing into fresh areas would take massive effort — if it could even be done at all.

Our person is trapped, frustrated, and unhappy.

No matter that he — or she — did it to himself. The result is a limited, tightly circumscribed pathway in life. At work, it means laboring over and over again at tasks that have long lost any challenge or interest. IN the rest of life, it means spending time in boredom — or maybe trying drastic means such as drink or drugs to bring some spark of difference. Any effort to change has become impossible. Motivation is now as flaccid and stale as life itself.

One resolution for a New Year

If you recognize any part of your own experience in this fable, beware. Millions of people before you have gone through the same, self-inflicted frustration. They gave up on their own path or career hopes, because it felt too difficult to make it through life’s snow drifts. From time to time, they tried paths others had already started — only to turn back when they found those paths headed only towards what that other person desired.

At this time of the year, people begin to make resolutions for the year to come. Most scarcely last through January before being abandoned. Our minds are so good at creating reasons to drop what seems to be too much effort. By March, the vast majority of resolutions are forgotten, as well as abandoned.

Only one resolution is needed: to make your own path through your life and career, despite the apparent effort. Winter snow does not last for ever. The path you make towards your own destination will soon reach a time when the snow melts and the going will be easier. There may be other difficult areas to cross later, but at least you will be going where you want to go.

Your own path will never become stale. There will be more than enough challenges to keep your mind sharp and your interest high. And whether that path is long or short, leads to dizzy heights or stays in the valleys, when you reach the end it will always have been yours.

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