DailyJim: New Year’s (conflict) resolutions

Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, December 31st, 2024, the last day, the New Year's Eve. And today I want to talk about New Year's conflict resolutions.

So normally we talk about New Year's resolutions, as a tradition of the year has ended, we're starting a new year, how do we start fresh? How do we have plans and hopes for what we're going to do next year? And not everyone makes these, but a lot of people make these and they don't keep them, which it's okay, it happens. But what I wanted to talk about today was this idea of not just having a resolution to do something, but maybe a resolution to resolve a conflict that has existed. What are some conflicts in your life that you have avoided? And sometimes avoided just in slight casual ways or sometimes maybe you're avoiding them so deeply that it drives you to an addiction of alcohol, sex, working, exercising.

What are the conflicts? What are the problems in your life that you're trying to avoid? And how would your new year look if you tried to resolve them?

It's not easy to resolve conflict sometimes. It causes a lot of pain, anger, jealousy, confusion, excitement, hope, hopelessness, a huge mix of emotion. It basically makes us feel a lot most of the time. But if we can get through it, we can actually get back to resolving it. And although some people believe that the resolution of conflict is peace, I actually believe the resolution of conflict is love. we can get back to loving ourselves and loving other people if we resolve certain conflicts. Now, there's always going to be conflicts in our lives. So if you resolve one conflict, it doesn't mean you're no longer going to have conflicts. But by resolving one, we can start practicing how to resolve other ones and addressing them as they arise. Now, maybe this seems a bit pedantic, me trying to stand on my soapbox and teach you, but this is also for me. What conflicts do I want to resolve? What conflicts do I want to address? Maybe they're not the main ones. Maybe they're the side conflicts, but a lot of times the side conflicts are actually the ones causing most of the problem, causing most of the anger, the sadness, the confusion. So what, and the fear. So just to reflect on what are some of the main conflicts and the side conflicts and the things that are so small that may not even seem like conflicts, and maybe they seem small because we've been avoiding and resisting and pretending that they don't exist for a very long time. Resisting the existence. Resistance to the existence. That's a good one.

And how would our 2025 look different if we just started addressing a few of those? Obviously, for me, if you've heard, I believe one of my main conflicts is the receiving of money so that I can pay rent, so that I can, you know, buy some new clothes, so that I can afford food, so I can, you know, cover many of the basics, but also so that I can do bigger things and so I can focus on other conflicts.

But maybe that's not the main, maybe that's the main conflict, but what are some side conflicts in my life? Maybe it's not knowing should I be in one place or another place, you know, not choosing where to be, not knowing where my location will be, not having more certainty over that or more prediction over that, not planning it more. Maybe it's the conflict and the fear of being more famous and the conflicts that may come about from that. Maybe it's conflicts with family members or with friends that have been unresolved and again, avoided. Yeah.

The idea of this is to, I think, instead of thinking like a New Year's resolution of I'm going to exercise in the gym more, yeah, that's the solution. Maybe not the, that's one potential solution, but what's the conflict? The conflict maybe is I feel out of shape, and I'm frustrated that I feel out of shape, because when I'm out of shape, I'm actually not able to resolve other conflicts, because maybe I don't have the energy, maybe I don't have the flexibility, maybe I don't have the strength. Maybe sometimes resolving a conflict is lifting somebody else up after they got sick or they passed out from too much drinking because they're avoiding conflicts. And yeah, it just kind of can spiral and kind of cascade, almost a domino effect. So this talk isn't super long because one, I went over time yesterday. And two, it's more about the concept than it is about me saying what your conflicts are. So the idea is, how do we pause before the next year, think about some of the conflicts in our lives, and even the lives of the people that we care about? Because even if we think those conflicts are not our conflicts, often they are, because we care about those people, and we see the pain that they have, and the fear that they have, and all the other emotions. Or maybe it's just the sadness of not achieving their dreams. So it's not always a conflict that is keeping them down so much. Sometimes it's a conflict that's holding them back from going after something bigger. And so thinking about the conflicts in our lives and the lives of those people that we love, what are some that we want to start to address? Some that we might want to try to resolve as the year starts? Again, I don't have the answers. This is kind of me just spewing it out into the internet and seeing, uh, throwing spaghetti at the wall. No, I think there's a little more, uh, substance to this than just seeing, throwing something against the wall to see what sticks. But um yeah so anyways i'm going to reflect on that in the next couple hours and i hope you do too and would love to hear what are some of the conflicts that you're addressing because. Yeah if i think love actually is just helping people resolve conflicts helping us ourselves resolve conflicts helping other people resolve them and address them so here's to a more loving and conflict-resolving, conflict-addressing 2025 vis-a-vis, kind of like instead of conflict avoidance, to 2025 where we start to have more courage to get into the fights to break through to the other side and realize that we're all struggling in this world. We all have so many conflicts going on, but at the same time, if we can help people with one or two, We can help ourselves with one or two. It can go a long way to making this life worth living. So I will talk to you all in the new year. Happy 2025 and all the other emotions that come along with 2025. Good night.