Reflections from the Swamp
It took me five days.
Five whole days to completely abandon the person I was supposed to become in 2026. And I have to say, I’m genuinely proud of that. Five days is a new personal record. Last year, I made it to January 4th before eating an entire packet of Speculaas cookies and a half bottle of pickled herring for breakfast and deciding that self-improvement was complicated. Carbohydrates are good. Good is better than bad. These are undisputable truths.
I told myself I wasn’t going to do resolutions this year. I wrote about it. I was very clear. Very firm. Resolutions are for people who still believe that sudden transformation is possible, and I am not one of those people. Gradual transformation, yes. I’m gradually transforming into an older man. I’ve been working on this slowly for years. The universe is unfolding as it should.
Somewhere in the dark hours of December 31st, while the rest of the country was deciding whether to stay up for the fireworks or go to bed at a sensible hour, my bride and I flicked on the TV in time to see the New Year’s roll in in Newfoundland, 10.30 p.m. our time. I made a secret resolution. Quietly. In the confines of my own mind, where no one could witness the betrayal. We went to bed at 10.30 p.m. I was a changed man. I was on the path to fluency in both languages.
I was going to learn Dutch.
Although born in Canada, my parents got off the boat in Halifax four months before I was born in Calgary. I’m a fake Dutchman. My first language was Dutch, unlike Brent Eades, the editor of Millstone News, who is an honest Dutch citizen because he was born in Aruba, a Dutch colony at the time. He doesn’t speak Dutch. Which one of us is the more fake as a Dutchman? This who is the Dutch-est question is a profoundly philosophical one more suitable for discussion at Timmy’s by older men over coffee than for this article.
My cousin is coming from Holland this summer. Although she speaks English well, the vain part of me wants to dazzle her with my brilliant Dutch, which, at this point in my life, has disintegrated into a childlike dialect, with grammarless forms, only understandable by five-year-old Dutch speakers raised in Canada.
This learning Dutch was going to be private, disciplined, and personal growth. Just me, twenty minutes a day, becoming gradually fluent enough to order more than “”Een lekker kopje koffie met room en een koekje”. I would eventually become fluent and present myself as a candidate to serve as Canada’s ambassador to the Netherlands, and introduce beavertails to Dutch cuisine.
Day one: Downloaded the app. Learned that “Ik ben” means “I am.” Felt quietly linguistic.
Day two: Still committed. Learned the word for apple. “appel.” Will I ever need this word? Unclear. But I realized it anyway.
Day three: The app introduced verb conjugations, and I experienced what can only be described as educational violence. I went to Google and looked up cool Dutch words instead of grammar lessons. The Dutch word for blue jeans is “spijkerbroek”, which means rivet pants. Peanut butter is “pindakaas,” which translates as “peanut cheese.” The Dutch word for gloves is” handschoeenen” which translates as hand shoes. Cool eh?
Day four: Skipped. Told myself I’d do double tomorrow. Made a cup of coffee and stared out the window at a flock of eleven Turkeys trudging through the snow.
Day five: Did not do double time. Made another cup of coffee. The snow continued, no turkeys in sight. I deleted the app. It was an act of kindness; I put both the Dutch instructors and myself out of misery.
I feel absolutely fantastic about it. I’m reducing pain and suffering in the world, another and more worthy goal for 2026.
I’ve realized—at 71, after decades of secret resolutions, abandoned projects, and quietly shelved ambitions—that the real resolution should have been: Stop pretending you’re the kind of person who keeps resolutions, even the ones you make in private.
The trouble with secret resolutions is that they’re even more insidious than public ones. At least with public resolutions, you can blame external pressure when you fail. But secret resolutions? Those are pure. Those are the ones you made entirely for yourself, which means when you abandon them, you can’t blame anyone else. You can’t say,” It’s Biden’s fault.” It’s just you, confronting the uncomfortable truth that you didn’t even want the thing you thought you wanted.
I didn’t want the pain of learning Dutch. I wanted to be the sort of person who learns Dutch effortlessly, which is not remotely the same thing.
The actual me—the one who exists at 7 a.m. on a cold January morning in Corkery—just wanted another cup of coffee and to look out the window for turkeys in peace.
Here’s what nobody tells you about New Year’s resolutions: they’re not really about self-improvement.
They’re about avoiding the person you actually are by chasing the person you think you should be.
I’m not the sort of person who learns languages in my spare time. I never have been. I knew what French I needed by reading the cornflakes box at breakfast, but I never enjoyed it.
And yet every January, some delusional part of my brain decides that this year I’ll suddenly develop a passion for linguistics. As if retirement has fundamentally altered my personality rather than just given me more time to notice who I actually am.
Here’s what I’ve learned in five days: I don’t need to speak Dutch. What I need is to stop feeling guilty about not speaking Dutch well. I don’t need to walk five kilometres a day. I need to accept that walking at a moderate pace in the woods is fine. I don’t need to meditate for twenty minutes every morning. I need to accept that staring out the window with a cup of coffee, looking for turkeys, is my version of mindfulness, and it works perfectly well.
The older I get, the more I realize that most self-improvement is just self-management.
Yesterday, while making my second cup of coffee and watching the blue jays fight over some peanuts, I realized that those bluejays aren’t trying to become better bluejays. They’re not making resolutions to be more aerodynamic or less aggressive around food. They’re just being precisely what they are with absolute commitment and zero guilt.
And I thought: that’s it. Just be more of who you already are, without apologizing for it.
What really exists? What exists is this: a 71-year-old man who drinks too much coffee, reads books about murder and spirituality, walks alone in the forest regardless of weather, and occasionally makes resolutions he has no intention of keeping just to feel like he can miraculously alter his character.
And you know what? That’s fine. That’s more than acceptable.
I wonder where the turkeys went? Maybe I could follow their tracks.
Nah, I’ll make some more coffee and wait for them to pass by the window.
