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I'm going to get fit this year.
I'm going to eat healthier this year.
I'm going to drink less this year.
It all sounded good, though like many folks who make New Year's Resolutions, I find I make the same ones almost every year. As 2015 dawned, I was off to a good start: I'd signed up for a 10-week Fight Camp bootcamp, registered for two vegetarian cooking classes, and cleared out my wine supply. (I gave away some, and - drank the rest on New Year's Eve.)
But in late January, my resolve hit the wall. There were wine-pairing dinners two nights in a row, with lots of rich food and too-generous pours. At 7 am the next day, when it was time to go my first session of fitness camp, I couldn't even get out of bed.
2015 had barely started, and the resolutions were once again in the toilet.
Just as I was shrugging off my abandoned resolve to improve myself - try again in 2016, right? - I received an e-mail from my old friend N.
A graduate of the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, N returned to his native Thailand when his grandmother became severely ill.
N is easily the most social human being I've ever met. He not only knows every song the Beatles and Elvis Presley ever recorded, he has been known to sing them - all of them - while enjoying noodles and beer at an outdoor cafe. (He thinks he's the re-incarnation of Elvis, except in those moments when he's channeling Jackie Chan.)
One night in that beery alley, he and about 10 fellow UIBE students from Thailand and Indonesia were about halfway through the Beatles canon. They belted out Can't Buy Me Love as green bottles of Tsingdao piled up on the table - and stripped ch'wan skewers massed in a huge circular mound around their table.
Finally, a colleague sitting with me at the next table leaned over and begged, "Hey, can you guys hold it down a little?"
My friend N was mortified, stepping over to our table and apologizing profusely. He was so humble - but so alive and energetic - that within 10 minutes our little group was singing the next Beatles song right with him.
Since then I'd seen him rarely, as he coped with family health and business issues. Though his many past enthusiasms never included politics, he is easily inflamed by any perceived injustice, and he joined Bangkok's street rallies that led to the Yingluck government's ouster last year.
Flash forward to last month, when N dashes off a chatty thank-you note for a Christmas gift - a coffee-table book about Beatles songs - and announces it will be the last day he can enjoy it.
"You know why?" he writes. "Because from tomorrow I'm not gonna be home for a long time because I'm gonna be a monk! Yeah, no hair, no eyebrow, no dinner, no alcohol, no money, no singing, no dinner, no Facebook, no mobile phone and 227 more rules of no!
"I'm going to be a monk for my most beloved grandmother who just passed away this year. I'm gonna be somewhere I could completely live a different, non-materialistic, very monastic life.
"A life of mostly learning, chanting, and teaching. I'm not sure that when you reply to my e-mail I still can read it or not, but if not, just wait till I come back to be a better human on earth and I'll give you a reply. I can't tell you how long, but I promise, we will meet again for sure."
I stare at the screen, dumbfounded. The N that I know didn't see to have any rules of no.
But now that my brother is lost in Thailand in a transubstantial way, I can only contemplate my own failed path to self-improvement. I can't manage to go and kick a heavy bag for an hour, once a week, for 12 weeks - while N has shaved his head and ridden off into a virtually silent world for a year. Or two?
A famed Cuban ballet teacher recently said that it's not hard to attract young dancers to a traditional art form like ballet. "But I do find it difficult to get them to concentrate on working - they want instant gratification, no sweat," she says.
"If you want to be good at something, you have to sweat it out."
But today it's my dear young friend who is prepared to sweat it out, while 50-something me ponders the odds of going to the gym ... next year.
