It's that time of year again. Seems like, as I grow older, the time goes faster every 365 days. The year 2008 is upon us, and I am once again making New Year's resolutions.
I am quitting smoking again. I quit from 1988 to 1992, and from 1997 to 2002. I have been starting and stopping ever since. Months off, then on again. Now is an on-again phase.
Alcohol, unless I drink to excess, either doesn't much affect me or actually makes life seem a little more filled with ease.
Cigarettes, even as few as three a day, scratch my throat and pull at my chest when I am walking up hills. So, Resolution No. 1: Quit smoking.
In another health-related deal, I weighed 161 pounds when I exited basic training 40 years ago. I came in second in the 2-mile run, with a full pack and combat boots, and had some ridiculous amount of body fat - 6 percent, if I recollect accurately.
In the '80s, settling into the middle of my 11-year marriage and eating a lot of my ex-wife's tastily fat, Southern black cooking, my weight crawled up to about 185.
The ensuing divorce and a move to Seattle, where I knew nobody and had to talk to female strangers at parties and clubs, forced me to shed the pounds quickly, since I needed whatever advantage fitness might confer in the dating game. By the time I moved in with Kiki, the Sun Valley restaurant owner, for a six-year run, I was back down around 170.
I kept it between 170 and 178, until I went to Hawaii in 2000. Despite walking a mile each way to the newspaper office in Lihue and swimming a half-mile a day five days a week, Hawaiian food (I can't, with a straight face, call it cuisine) packed the pounds back on. Kahlua pork, loco mocos for breakfast and macaroni salad do not a sveltester make. By the time I fled back to Seattle five years ago, I weighed 185 again.
Daily yoga classes and golf three days a week, always walking and always carrying my own bag, helped me get down to and stay at about 178.
But in the last six months since I started working in Alzheimer World, I have been eating and even drinking to excess. A young African co-worker asked me the other day if I was gaining weight.
"I always weigh 175," I told her, but as soon as she left the ward I jumped on the scale we use for daily weighings of the elderly patients. The needle stuck at 189. Subtract 3 or 4 pounds for trainers, sportcoat and Levis, and you still are talking 185. Yet again.
So I am going to cut down portions and cut out snacks and try to quit every day at two glasses of wine no matter how stressed my job is making me.
I already walk at least 2 miles every day, so I'm going to need to add weights and yoga on alternate days, too.
Thus, Resolution No. 2 is get the old scale back down between 171 and 174 and keep it there.
Lastly...
Every year I work on what seems to be the same old faults. Last year I determined never to lie, even white lies, unless to tell the truth would endanger me or someone close to me.
While I was trying to work on that, I found myself talking more, not less. So this year, stealing a page from the medieval Zen scholar Dogen, I am going to try and speak only every other time I've got something to say. Dogen advised speaking only every third time, but hey, he wasn't half-Irish.
Resolution No. 3 is to listen more, observing first, before the inevitable judging that creeps in, and to speak only every other time I want to shoot my mouth off. Check back in a year and I'll let you know how I did.
How about you? Making any rezzies yourself? And if you made any for 2007, how did ya do?
Dennis Wilken's column appears periodically in the Capitol Hill Times. Reach him at editor@capitolhilltimes.com.
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