Mopping Up After New Year’s Resolutions Past : COMMITMENTS

I’ve got a stock New Year’s resolution which, until now anyway, has served me pretty well. It is, simply, to appreciate the moment.

This is not easily accomplished. It takes constant vigilance. You’ve got to keep a running inventory of what’s important and what’s not. You’ve got to grip the substance with all your might, and aggressively cast off the nonsense.

So the kids’ clothes are filthy, their hair is in snarls, and it’s school picture day. So they’ll look like hell for all posterity. But they’re loved. And they know it.

End of issue.

Partly, this is a survival trick for getting through too-full days. Partly, it’s a non-prescription alternative to Prozac.

But it’s also an essentially fatalistic approach to life, the underlying assumption being that we cannot control the future; all we can do is savor the present.

This year, though, I’m having trouble renewing my commitment to letting the superfluous slide. Because I’m suddenly mindful of its consequences--its wreckage.

The problem is that, if you’re lucky, time does pass. And over time, much of the superfluous evaporates but some of it doesn’t. It mounts. It festers. I’ve gotten adept enough at sloughing it off at any given moment, but what am I supposed to do with it over the long haul?

Like a landfill that’s reached capacity, I’m faced with the daunting challenge of long-term disposal. It’s fine to have cast aside the unnecessary. But where does it go from here?

I look around and see the effects of so many New Year’s resolutions past. I see the consequences, big and small, of the Zen thing:

No retirement plan.

An expired emissions sticker.

A busted faucet.

A 1-year-old who has yet to be captured on videotape.

Inadequate life insurance.

An unpaid parking ticket.

Last year’s Christmas cards, never mailed.

And then there are the hundreds and hundreds of snippets of paper covered with little phrases, sentence fragments, passing notions. They record thoughts that apparently, at some moment in time, seemed worthy of the written word. Now, like confetti, they litter my home, my office, my car.

My life is not a drawing whose color I’m filling in; it’s a crazy collage I’m losing all hope of ever being able to assemble. I’ve got 15 years’ worth of family snapshots, still in the Fotomat envelopes. Perhaps it’s time to buy an album.

Yes, I suppose it’s time to mop up a bit, to strive for some semblance of organization, to get a 1995 calendar before January is out. It’s time to seek a trace of cohesion, some vague order, perhaps a clean closet or two.

A friend in similar straits advises me not to even try to go back, but to pick it up from here. Leave the old photos where they are, she says. Buy a bunch of small albums, and use one per occasion. A birthday, a vacation, a Christmas. Fill them as you go. Now there’s a concept I can buy into.

Revised resolution: Do just enough planning to appreciate the moment even more.