V. Resolutions Made and Resolutions Kept

V

RESOLUTIONS MADEAND RESOLUTIONS KEPT

THE trouble with the average man is not that he neglects to make resolutions. The trouble is that he makes far too many resolutions. Making resolutions is sometimes his principal daily occupation. He is forever forgetting or breaking them, and that is why he has to make them all over again.

You, O reader, have probably been through this experience, so often that you dislike to be reminded of it. It is probably your consciousness of past events that has tempted you to read this book. Now there is something to be said for you. You realize your imperfections. You are splendidly dissatisfied with your present habits, your present mode of loving, your present station in life. You say to yourself, “This will never do.” You see things as they would be if you could get up earlier in the morning, if you could break that absurd habit of setting your alarm clock for seven, getting up, shutting it off, going back to bed with the honest intention of taking just a five minutes’ snooze, and not waking up until quarter to eight. Ridiculous as it is, the habit repeats itself morning after morning. You jump with a start; you have a wild notion that the alarm clock has played a trick on you; you dress in six minutes, shave in four, bolt your breakfast, make some excited, irritated, unkind remarks to your wife, start for the station or the street car like a man in a walking race, break into a run, curse the line waiting for tickets, and when you are finally aboard your train, which trudges along and loiters around stations as if all eternity were before it, you say to yourself, “This will never do.”

In that ride on the train to your office, you see things as they might be. You see yourself getting up at seven, dressing at your leisure, eating breakfast in an expansive mood; no friction; no irritation; no squabbles with friend wife; no dreadful fear that you are going to miss your train, or that somebody will look first at you, at the clock, and then at you as you come in the office. In that ride on the train you have glimpsed perfection. And you make a tremendous resolution. “This thing has been going on long enough. It’s preposterous. It has got to stop. Tomorrow I will get up at seven.”

And what happens? Well, you arrive at the office and there are a number of things to occupy attention; your resolution, temporarily, drops out of mind. Jones (my chief illustrative standby) wanders in and suggests his little game of poker that night. It is conceivable that you are not ashamed to protest, and that you indicate your new desire to keep early hours. Jones assures you it won’t be long; just a hand or two. You go. You arrive home at 1:30, having had, in the main, and evening not too stupid, but inwardly grumbling that you got back so late, or that somehow you couldn’t have spent five hours at Jones’s house and still have arrived home two hours after you left home. You go to bed; you sleep. . . . The alarm rings. Seven o’clock! You get up, automatically, in a daze, angry and resentful against the alarm that you yourself have set. You shut it off. You trun back toward the bed, like a marionette, without consciousness of a decision or of any thought whatever; you retrace your steps; you are about to get into bed again; a vague recollection of yesterday’s resolution (and perhaps also it is the resolution of the day before yesterday and of the day before that) flits uneasily across your mind. But you are sleepy; sleep is indispensable; the trouble yesterday was not that you went back to bed, but that you overslept when you got there; Just a five minute snooze. . . . You awake. Ten minutes to eight! Impossible! And in the midst of your five-minute dress, and your three-and-a-half minute shave, and your bolted breakfast, you still have a corner of your mind that is reflecting on what an ass you have been, and making a resolution that this must be stopped. And so on, as one day follows another.

The example is chosen at random. It is not an extreme example. It is not the most powerful I could have selected. But it suffices to illustrate my point. The trouble is that even in your moments on the train you never sufficiently convinced yourself that you really wanted to get up and stay up when the alarm rang. At nine o’clock in the morning, on your way to work, you have been thinking only of one side of the case; and at seven o’clock the next morning you have been thinking only of the other side.

Understand me, I am not saying that it would be to your advantage to make that resolve on the train. I do not contend that it would be better to get up at seven and take your time than to get up at quarter to eight and hurry. You are the judge of that. I disclaim any moral attitude whatever. But I insist that if you do make a resolve it should be carried out. There should be never an exception. This point is supreme. To make a resolve and break it is demoralizing. Though not a single other soul on earth should know it, though God himself should not know, you would know it. You would have to confess your failure to yourself. To break a resolve is to undermine your self-respect. To break a resolve is to lose faith in yourself. It shakes your confidence that you can keep any other. The next time you become suddenly disgusted with any action or habit, and you clench your teeth and your left fist, and are just about to drive your left fist into the open palm of your right, and say to yourself. “The next time I—“you are apt to stop short and think of your previous failure, and the bitter irony of it all may rush over you. You start at the very beginning with an unwholesome doubt of whether you are going to keep your resolve. And when self-respect and self-faith are gone, nothing else is worth while. But with every resolution kept, be it ever so small a resolution, your faith in your self grows. The keeping of the next resolution becomes tremendously easier. Will-power comes into its inheritance.

The moral of all this is that you should make fewer resolutions and keep more. The foolish resolution is the resolution made in a moment of passion and self-disgust. It is well that you should have such moments. It is of such moments that great achievements are born. But before you make a resolve that you seriously mean to execute, look at it coldly and completely. Think not alone of the benefits of keeping it, but of the disadvantages. If you have been lying in bed until quarter to eight, you have not been doing so unless there were some advantages to lying in bed until quarter to eight. Consider these advantages in the moment of your resolve. Do not pass them over in contempt. Weigh them at their full value. Measure the sacrifice of forsaking them. Balance it against the advantages of getting up promptly at seven. You may decide that getting up promptly at seven is not worth its price. You may decide to compromise on half past seven, which would allow you half an hour’s more sleep and a little more time to dress. Upon what you decide it is not for me to comment. But your decision should be carried out. No more demoralizing course could be conceived than daily to resolve to arise at seven and the next day always to wait until a quarter to eight. Such a course comes only because, when you make your resolves, you do not fairly face the price.

This rule is so important, and has so wide a bearing, that we cannot forsake it here. It applies to all our resolves. Let me illustrate with the example that has become the favorite with all writers on will. I refer to drinking. The law-makers insist on solving this particular will-problem for us, but the Constitutional Amendment, so far as I am aware, puts no ban on its invaluable use as a literary example. Moreover, I cannot be arrested for pointing out that the actual temptations to drinking are not altogether a thing of the past.

You have a drink; then another. Perhaps you have one or two more, though the count becomes rather confusing after a time. The liquor “touches the spot,” as you say, and for a time it produces a mental and emotional reaction that is highly delightful. But the next morning your stomach is upset; your food doesn’t taste right; you have a headache; your mental and physical movements are slow and listless; you get little work done; the color of the universe is drab. You are probably minus a good deal of money. You feel your self-respect slipping. You are losing the respect of your friends. And your resolve that morning, accompanied with the usual terrible knitting of brow and clenching of fist and of teeth (as if that helped) is that these occasions of getting drenched must forever cease, end, terminate.

And then what? That acute psychologist, William James, can tell you much better than I:

how many excuses does the drunkard find when each new temptation comes! It is a new brand of liquor which the interests of intellectual culture in such matters oblige him to test; moreover it is poured out and it is sin to waste it; also others are drinking and it would be churlishness to refuse. Or it is but to enable him to sleep or just to get through this job of work; or it isn’t drinking, it is because he feels so cold; or it is Christmas-day; or it is a means of stimulating him to make a more powerful resolution in favor of abstinence than any he has hitherto made; or it is just this once, and one doesn’t count, etc., etc., ad libitum—it is, in fact, anything you like except being a drunkard. That is the conception that will not stay before the poor soul’s attention. But if he once gets able to pick out that way of conceiving form all the other possible ways of conceiving the various opportunities which occur, if through thick and thin he holds to it that this is being a drunkard and nothing else, he is not likely to remain one long. The effort by which he succeeds in keeping the right name unwaveringly present to his mind proves to be his saving moral act.

And how is he to get “able to pick out that way of conceiving” and hold to it? There is only one way. Not in the moment of temptation, but in the moment of his resolve, on “the morning after,” that is the time for him to summon all these excuses before him, to bring up every possible excuse, to think of every conceivable advantage of drinking, and then to ask himself whether they are powerful enough to offset the conception of being a drunkard, or whether the advantages of drinking outweigh its disadvantages. He must give an honest answer then. If he ignores these excuses, on the ground that they are unworthy his noble resolve, he will find them dancing before his eyes in the next moment of temptation; and not having faced and answered them when he was in the mood to face and answer them, he is not likely to face them in that unhappy moment.