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“So often in these times of stress, we tend to really focus on what’s wrong and what is unknown and what we need to worry about,” she says on cnet.com. “But there are ways that we can kind of try to shift our perspective and even just being more attentive, aware and grateful for the things that are going well or that are stable.”
Who started this whole resolution craze in the first place? According to history.com, “the ancient Babylonians are said to have been the first people to make new year’s resolutions, some 4,000 years ago. They were also the first to hold recorded celebrations in honour of the new year — though for them the year began not in January but in mid-March, when the crops were planted.”
A similar practice occurred in ancient Rome, notes history.com, after the reform-minded emperor Julius Caesar tinkered with the calendar and established January 1 as the beginning of the new year circa 46 B.C. The month was named for Janus, “the two-faced god” whose spirit inhabited doorways and arches, and the Romans believed that Janus symbolically looked backwards into the previous year and ahead into the future, so they offered sacrifices and promises of good conduction for the coming year.
When all is said and done, people will still be making those resolutions. It is part of the new year’s celebrations. Why? “The events of 2020 have made us really think about what matters most,” notes Cratejoy.com, a monthly boxed subscription service), who recently explored this “optimistic and somewhat controversial enterprise” in a recent online survey, which found that “72% of respondents agreed that this year helped them realize what was most important to them, valuing physical and mental health and relationships with family and friends over anything else.
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