Right about now, you may be feeling that urge, which hits sometime during the first couple of months of every year, the urge to forget the New Year’s resolutions to which you had so daringly committed only weeks ago. After all, you’ve already eaten that cake, skipped that workout session, smoked that cigarette… whatever. You tried, you failed.

But if the resolution was a good idea to start with—good enough for you to resolve to do it in the first place—then it’s probably still a good idea now. And giving up on resolutions, it seems to me, may be the sign of an addiction.

What do I mean by that? I’m glad you asked.

First Snow

Or to quote Lorelai Gilmore: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have flakes. Flakes have been sighted. Flakage, if you will, has begun.”

Yesterday afternoon and into the night, the season’s first snow in the Boston area (and if I recall correctly, in New England generally).

I settled in, and popped in Gilmore Girls season 1, disc 2, episode 8, “Love, War, and Snow.” Sigh.

A Motto Worth Remembering

As you may remember, after the NOKWID project several years ago, I crashed, hard, spent several months deep in depression. And I just now finally feel like I’ve climbed out of that hole, a hole I had ironically dug for myself.

I felt forever tired, forever useless, forever a burden on my family. Nothing gave me pleasure, no joy, no motivation, and I didn’t care. At one point, I even contemplated what steps I would need to take in order to make a strategic exit from this life. (Fortunately, there were too many steps, too complicated.) Oy vey! It makes sense that a demoralizing job might get me down. But that’s supposed to be temporary, not life-destroying.

Then, through the work of Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, I found I could take steps toward rediscovering the joy and motivation I had lost from my life.

According to Dave Ramsey, money arguments are the number-one cause of marital strife.

Now, I’m not sure where he got that factoid. And I don’t actually know whether it’s true, because marriages—as all relationships—are more complex and nuanced than a single cause. Regardless, it is surely true that money arguments are a leading factor in failing marriages.

In early 2009, after a series of bad software development jobs, I sunk into a deep depression. At the time, I attributed my mood to the bankruptcy of the software industry— And I still believe the industry in general is broken in several key areas, and needs to be fixed. But I later discovered, my problem was mostly connected to my own reactions, my own thoughts, going through my own mind, what Perry Marshall calls “inner head trash."

It’s the last day before Christmas. Each year, the kids at church perform at our Christmas Eve service. And this year, Sondra (of In the Deep) has put together a wonderful kids program, with lots of special music. And I’m happy to have been a part of it.

I’ve been trying to spend more time on domestic accomplishments, like keeping house and helping out at church, and the holidays have given me an opportunity to do so. Over the past week, I’ve produced chord sheets for two songs that the kids will be covering, learned both of them (one on the keyboard, one on the bass), practiced with C the song we’ll be playing together, set out Christmas music for congregational singing tonight, and shuttled the kids to and from practice. What I found is that doing these things helps me feel better about myself.

So concurs a psychological study of happiness during the holidays:

Isn’t it amazing, with the amount of time we as Christians spend in worship, and especially singing in worship, that we understand so little about it.

This thought strikes me now, just a couple nights away from the next “In the Deep” (Saturday night, at which I’ll be subbing on bass, because their usual bassist is getting married). “In the Deep” is a biweekly, interdenominational praise and worship concert. Concert after concert through the autumn and winter, crowds gather from all over the area to soak in the candlelit ambience, to fill the Newton, MA sanctuary with over an hour of passionate worship in song, and then to gather downstairs for snacks and fellowship.

[Update: The event is no longer held there.]

Why?

One of my daughters today was approaching tears, when I almost blew up at her. I didn’t actually yell at her, I hope, but I felt my temperature and voice rising in unison.

She was upset, because we didn’t have an extra pool pass, so that she could go to the community pool party today, which our apartment complex throws for its residents each year. She’s an innovator, like her old man, so she quickly found a solution to her dilemma. She discovered that you don’t actually need a pool pass to get into the party—you only need a pass if you actually want to swim; and you can probably get around that rule, too, because it’s the end of the season. And so she went to the party with her friend and her friend’s mother.

But before that happened, for a few seconds there, she was standing in front of me, with that desperate, pouty, life-is-falling-apart face that feels like a wood rasp rubbing through my heart. And that made me sad and upset, not because we thought she couldn’t go, but because she so desperately wanted to go.

One of the most persistent misconceptions regarding dreams is that they represent wishes. This notion was first popularized by Freud, and since then, it has stuck to the pop culture like Super Glue. Every one of us has at one time or another dreamed of a romantic encounter with some partner other than his spouse. And every one of us has been afraid to share that dream, lest she get the wrong idea.

But dreams do not, as Freud supposed, represent wishes. Rather, as recent research has suggested, dreams represent unfulfilled emotional expectations. That is, during the day we expected to feel a certain way, to have a certain emotional experience, and we didn’t. Someone did something or some event occurred to emotionally arouse us, but we never acted on that emotional arousal. In the meantime, our brains are geared up for the feelings that would have resulted had we acted on our feelings. Dreams are the result, dreams about those feelings, but not about the same people and events that caused the feelings.

This is called the Expectation Fulfillment Theory of Dreaming, first published in 1993 by psychologist Joe Griffin, who first stated the theory. Since then, the theory has gained support, as more research has borne out its conclusions and predictions. Since I’ve been keeping track, in my own informal research, it has also consistently explained my own dreams.

[Note: This is a recounting of an experience from several years ago. Read the story from the beginning in order to catch up.]

According to psychologist Joe Griffin, the cycle of depression starts when innate needs are not being met. Among these are a sense of achievement and knowing that we are valuable to others. Setbacks like this, however, are just a part of life. What turns setbacks into depression is when they dominate one’s thoughts, they overwhelm him, and he loses hope.

Unfortunately, if my previous work situation epitomized camaraderie, this one did the opposite: