I have a completely different take on resolutions this year.

Mostly, I’ve found, resolutions are about gaining control. Setting goals to attain, like writing a book or losing weight. Getting better at something, like being more organized or finding more prayer time. Reading more. Watching less TV. All of that? It’s about exercising control over the environment, my life, and my future.

And then this year, just over a week before Christmas, I understood exactly how little control I actually have. I fell and broke my arm—a compound fracture that was both serious—and seriously painful. The fact of having a to-do list for that day was suddenly irrelevant, as other people and things stepped in to change my plans for me. The EMTs. The emergency room staff.

The pain. 

I went from feeling like I had things pretty much under control to being completely and utterly out of control. I hadn’t wrapped my Christmas presents. I hadn’t vacuumed my cottage. I hadn’t finished a couple of writing assignments in process. And now none of that was going to get done.

Other people made decisions for me. Friends stepped in to help, to bring me groceries and homemade soup, to drive me to have surgery and checkups, to feed and medicate my cat. Days went by in a blur of pain and Netflix. Resolutions? Control? I was overjoyed the first day I could manage to zip up my jeans! Baby steps.

So as I look at the ending of one year and the beginning of another, I’m less inclined this time around to make lists and goals and plans. Of course I’ll do them all eventually—life often seems to be a series of lists and goals and plans, doesn’t it? But now that I’ve experienced for myself how life can change radically in a moment, how it can spin completely out of control between one step and the next, I don’t want to waste time thinking. I want to spend more time feeling.

I didn’t get my Christmas presents out in time, but I received the most wondrous and unexpected Christmas gift imaginable: the blessing of so many people ready to drop their own plans and lists so they could help me. I want to take that gift and do something with it. I want to spend this year seeing who I can help in any small way possible. I want to spend this year being that same blessing for other people. I want to drop my own plans and lists to help others.

I want to place more value on what I have. I still haven’t vacuumed my cottage, but when I do, instead of complaining about the drudgery of the task, I’m going to delight in being able to do it all on my own. In not having to wait for someone to come and do it for me. I want to spend this year being grateful for what I can do now, instead of constantly ignoring the present in order to strive for the future.

In one of the old Planet of the Apes movies, one of the characters talks about the moment his life changed. “You see,” he says, “I had this accident.” Another character anxiously asks him what happened. He smiles, albeit a little sadly. “I collided,” he says, “with the truth.” 

As for me, I collided with the ground, but there was a lot of truth in that collision as well. My resolutions this year are simpler than they’ve ever been, but they transcend anything I’ve ever come up with, too. They’re about caring. They’re about gratitude. They’re about joy.

Not a bad way to start the new year.