Does a New Year’s resolution have to be new? That’s a question I’ve been asking myself recently. The answer I’ve come to isn’t a simple yes or no. Let me back up a moment and take a slightly different route.

Does a New Year’s resolution have to be a new resolution, one that you haven’t made before? The contrary impulse in me says “no.” A first glance at the basic notion says “yes.” Further reflection suggests the answer “no,” but in a more nuanced way. And still further reflection returns a “yes,” with still greater nuance.

The First No

The contrarian impulse: This is sort of a knee-jerk reaction to say “no,” it doesn’t have to be new if I decide it doesn’t. There isn’t really any reason or evidence here, but at least it holds open a willingness not to accept to most obvious answer.

The First Yes

The most obvious answer, if you glance for moment at the general notion of a New Year’s resolution, would instead seem to be “yes,” it would have to be new. After all, it seems to contain the sense of “turning over a new leaf,” of deciding to do something different. This coming year I’m going to be more healthy, or be less contrary, or finish a book I stopped reading halfway through two years ago. It would have to be new, right?

The Second No

Thinking further about it, and considering the matter in more detail, it isn’t so cut and dry. There are multiple ways a New Year’s resolution could be something that isn’t new, or at least, isn’t entirely new. First, I see no reason why the resolution cannot or should not be a re-commitment to something you are already doing. When I think about how you might come up with suitable resolutions, I imagine asking a question such as: What is something that would be good to pay special attention to, something it would be good to prioritize, this next year? If the best answer happens to be something you’re already doing, does it really make sense to disqualify it for that reason? If so, that implies choosing to prioritize something other than what would be best to prioritize, doesn’t it? And wouldn’t that defeat the whole point?

Another possibility is that you made a resolution last year, and eventually failed to keep it. Maybe it would be good to make that same resolution a second time (or a third), particularly if it’s especially important or apt?

A third possibility is something that you did not do consistently last year, but did do in one or more years sometime prior to the last. I myself am considering some resolutions of that sort. This past year and a half I have let my focus/efforts lapse — in a relative sense — with respect to prioritizing health and meditation. This was in part, by the way, because it became necessary to focus on certain other matters. However, I believe I’ll have the opportunity to re-prioritize a focus on health and meditation this year, and I feel they most deserve to be prioritized at this time. I really can’t not make those my resolutions, or at least among my top New Year’s resolutions, this year. Although they differ from last year’s most emphasized priorities, they have been top priorities in other recent years, and may have been among my New Year’s resolutions not too long ago (I’m not entirely certain if they were formal resolutions or not). So while new compared specifically to this past year, they are also not new compared to the years immediately prior.

The Second Yes

That was the more nuanced “no” answer to the question. There’s also a nuanced “yes” answer. I had originally thought through a highly complex account of this answer, but it now escapes me. I’m left instead with what might be the core gist of it: Any resolution is new when it is taken, even if it is one that has been taken before. If you commit to something now, for the new year, it isn’t not new just because you had been doing it, or had done it previously, or had taken it as a resolution at some time in the past. Whatever you resolve for the new year, is new.

A Philosophical Note

I like this meditation because it gets into the details and the real particularities, the actual reality, of the matter. It doesn’t argue an abstract verbal position based on superficialities of the first glance at a concept, and it doesn’t insist on concluding an affirmation or negation. Instead it takes the question as a starting point to work one’s way into the territory under consideration and explore it. It comes away with a better understanding, not with a simplistic vote one way or the other. True, it does end on a “yes” answer, but that is a complex “yes” which incorporates and validates the entirety of the nuanced “no” which precedes it.