I was listening to the radio the other day while running errands. The deejay chimed in about how he had already failed at his new year’s resolutions to eat more healthfully and spend less time on his mobile phone. There would be no “Quitter’s Day”1 for him partway into the month. Within the hour after the clock struck midnight on January 1, he had consumed a couple of slices of pizza laid out on a refreshments table at the party where he was, and scrolled through his social feeds.
He left himself no room for mulligans, zero grace, no re-dos. “I failed,” he said. “That’s it.”
This kind of thinking is what tends to make people make new year’s resolutions in the first place. Goals are set to make oneself more perfect. The focus is the outcome, scuttling what the process of change entails. The hard parts, the ugly parts, the oops and messiness gets shoved into the shadows. When the idealized version of transformation doesn’t manifest, without screwups and indicators that an actual human is trying to make something happen, negative emotions can bubble up, and with them, self-abuse in the form of little voices echoing in a person’s head that they are undeserving of their goals, hopeless, incompetent, lazy or worse.
These are ugly feelings, and they get in the way. Because of them, at least 80% of people give up their resolutions.
This piece is about working with what you have, even when things are less than desirable, to produce something positive.
I’d been sick. It was the kind of low-down illness that started mildly enough with the trifling symptoms of a simple cold — a sniffle, then a sore throat, a little cough. At first, I didn’t mind too much slowing down so my body could heal itself. It was kind of nice taking a couple of days to turn down life’s pace.
Then the cold outstayed its welcome, sinking deeper into my skull and bones and chest, turning into angry bronchitis that refused to quit or quiet, rattling me nightly with a raw hacking that kept sleep at bay.
I tried holding on to my optimism at first, thinking recovery might be around the corner any day. Yet the illness carried on for weeks, and made me disappear. I huddled in my bed like a wounded animal. Laundry piled up. Emails went unread, errands undone, the rest of my family left to fend for themselves. Glazed over with sleep deprivation and fever dreams, I retreated further and further from my daily routines. I lost social contact, my appetite, patience, clarity.
Zombie-like, I finally sought help at an urgent care clinic. The one near my home had so many patients queued up, it stopped letting new ones through the door. That I wasn’t the only one suffering was no comfort.
I drove almost an hour to another clinic, where I had to wait over two hours to be seen. It was worth it: the clinic doctor graciously prescribed a small arsenal of medications, including cough syrup with codeine.
In just a few days, it seemed the meds were working. Pharmaceutically-induced sleep bolstered my energy. I began to think that I could nudge myself towards a fuller recovery by resuming my normal habits.
The day I set out to get my boys off to school and walk the dog in the morning blazed with unusual, unseasonal glory. What should have been bundle-up weather was a sunny seventy degrees. Its radiance felt full of promise. I felt as though Mother Nature set out a “Welcome Back!” beacon for me, encouraging my recovery. At the dog park, gold light danced off the grass in one direction as an intense halo from the sun’s slow crawl into the morning sky blinded the view directly in front of me.
“Hey! Long time no see!” From the corner of my eye, I could make out one of my neighbors and his golden retriever approaching.
I was so hungry for conversation.
I turned, ready to return the greeting. Then reality smacked me with a nasty phlegmy rasp. Instead of saying “hi” back, my voice jammed in my throat, quickly escalating into a full force cough storm. Forget any semblance of cordiality. I couldn’t catch my breath. I stood there, hacking away, shaking my head back and forth at my dog park friend, holding out my hand in a traffic cop gesture to stop and keep distance.
I felt hot, sweaty, off-balance, like a valve suddenly had released pounds of pressure throughout my being. Everything inside my head dulled, my skull wadded with wool. Fever heat pulsed through me, and I swayed under a sudden, urgent need to lie down.
In that moment, too, came a flood of conflicted feelings. I felt ugly and disgusting and out of control, and overwhelmed with resentment. I thought I was getting better! It wasn’t my fault that I was sick, but I couldn’t ignore the brewing anger that I had been out of commission already for so long and still didn’t have it in me to be up and about. My mind and body played tug of war: my psychological readiness to return to normalcy soured spiritually because my body wasn’t taking the hint.
My powerlessness made me feel ashamed and weak. I was lonely and tired and bored. I wanted to participate in my life again, to connect with people and all the familiar bits of my day-to-day existence. I wanted to be outside, I wanted to play, to revel in the atypical weather and enjoy the day in all of its refreshingly temperate beauty.
When you tell someone who is having a tantrum to relax, calm down — well, we all know that doesn’t work. I was playing that game with myself, brain gears grinding away even as I struggled to stay my balance.
In my soul, I knew that wrangling wasn’t helping. I could see that things were not going to play out in the best version I desired, no matter how much I wanted it. I weighed denial, the option to force my will, stay the course and continue on my dog walk. Seize the day rather than letting it pass in repose because… spending one more day in bed seemed like a waste of such inviting beauty.
There was also the possibility that I might pass out on the pavement. Really, I was that dizzy. The consequences of a public fainting could be more embarrassing than the disappointment of listening to my body telling me to haul myself back to bed.
This is where process mattered. I had enough wisdom to recognize what I could and could not change. I wasn’t going to get better instantly, no matter how much I wanted to. I could choose the white flag of acceptance, acknowledge that my efforts were well-intended but premature, embrace the ick and salvage what I could in the hours ahead.
Since I couldn’t find comfort under the sun, I would need to find something to help wash away the literal and figurative ugly feelings welling inside. Rest was in the plan, of course; but first, I would make soup.
I am grateful for my appliances. My Instant Pot sets a low bar for effort. The promise of a steaming mug of fresh chicken broth helped me muster the little energy I needed to pull things from the refrigerator, dump them into the pot, and let the machine do the rest.
The vegetable drawer in my refrigerator was full of neglect. I hadn’t been shopping for weeks. The stuff in the crisper was no longer crisp, definitely not pretty. Most people would consign it all to the compost pile without second thought. There were leftovers from a bundle of green onions whose color had faded from vibrant tropical green to the color of shade garden moss; the desiccated nub of young ginger that I’d bought from a farmer’s market stall weeks before; curled and drying greens from my favorite Japanese farm stand at the market; celery odds and ends, with fraying leaves and gently browning edges; a pale half stalk of lemongrass.
As unimpressive as these items looked, my interest in them was not superficial. Heat and water would draw out their flavor, blending them together into something simple, remarkable, just what I needed. The solids, once cooked down, would be strained out, so it didn’t matter to me that they were not picture perfect. Their aromatic essence would turn to liquid gold. If I couldn’t be out in the sunshine, I could at least make some of my own.
I threw all these ugly bits into my pressure cooker pot, along with a chicken across whose skin I had scattered a dose of ground pepper; a quartered, peeled onion; scrubbed, unpeeled carrots; stars of anise; bay leaves; a second, fat thumb of ginger root, along with the green ginger stalk that had come attached to the now partially dried nub mentioned above; kosher salt; garlic cloves; a generous pinch of Sichuan pepper corns full of floral, fruity spiciness; and water to cover it all.
There is something ridiculously affirming about throwing scraps into a pot and generating something that is basically translucent but so rich in flavor. The possibility of creating something desirable from rejected items is part of the magic of cooking. In exchange for nominal creative effort, you can get pleasure. Chefs have been doing this for centuries, taking larder remnants and saved scraps and combined them to make something better than the individual parts.
Forty-five minutes and a good nap later, I had a flavorful, soothing elixir to quiet the ickiest of my petulant feelings. A homemade healing potion, not to mention room in my crisper drawer — even in my misery, I was creating mental and physical space for something new. The broth’s steamy heat released the grip of congestion in my head and chest. Its savory aroma flooded my senses, unclogging the bitterness that had unsettled my mood earlier. I hadn’t solved everything, but I created comfort.
It all could have gone to waste. I could have stayed mad at myself, I could have thrown away my shriveling produce. Instead I took the scraps I had and put them to use. I used the junk to nourish myself.
Here are my two bits for 2025:
Skip the resolutions. Look at what you’ve got and see what you can make of it.
The second Friday in January.