When I opened the kitchen door, Jupiter looked out, sniffed the air and, clearly offended, stalked back to his kibble.

A new year is a clean slate, virgin territory, a chance to make a fresh start.

Thinking of 2024 this way may feel liberating, but it’s also a little stymying, because it’s staging our performance in the coming year as an all or nothing proposition. What if we make a false move now, as we are prone to do, and mess up the year so early on? We might think, Oh, what’s the use, the resolution is already broken, so just forget about it. After all, there’s always 2025.

I wonder if social scientists at a major university have ever conducted a study to determine whether people consume more junk food, alcoholic beverages and tobacco products and generally engage in riskier behaviors during the last month of the year — December — than at any other time.

Actually, who needs a study? We all know this to be true. Time after time, we’ve seen the evidence all around us. Television and internet ads as well as sales figures bear it out. Let’s try to pack as much bad behavior as we possibly can into what’s left of the old year before we start trying to follow our New Year’s resolutions.

You may say that whatever one is doing on the last day of the year one is likely to continue doing in the coming year; but while there’s some truth in this rather depressing pronouncement, it doesn’t apply to everyone, not literally. I mean, who’s going to constantly party down, swig bubbly, watch the ball drop in Times Square and kiss everyone in their general proximity all through 2024? On the other hand, if you’re talking about those who fell asleep reading a good book after turning in at 9 o’clock on New Year’s Eve, then yes, I see your point.

Instead of using the black and white, untrammeled snow, all or nothing approach to the new year, it might be more useful to keep in mind that in reality New Year’s Day is no different from any other day. Every day, whether it’s in January or July or any other month, is a new day. Every hour is a new hour. Every minute — you get my gist.

Then again, you might want to just forget the resolution thing altogether, the way most of us have by February anyway.

Remember when the millennium freaks predicted that as the new year rang in for 2000, everything would blow up?

This wasn’t about terrorism, but about computers. How the world’s computers weren’t calibrated to accept a year beginning with the numeral 2. When confronted with the new millennium, computers everywhere, especially big, powerful, government computers, were expected to go berserk and start launching nuclear weapons. Jumbo jets would rain from the heavens like ripe plums, or cluster flies. Chaos would ensue. Anarchy would reign.

Remember how we ran around in a snit like Cinderella at the ball, knowing that her coach was on the verge of turning into a pumpkin? We were buying generators and stockpiling water, food and first-aid supplies. (This same emergency behavior was demonstrated later during the COVID pandemic.) At least some of us were demonstrating this emergency behavior. I personally found the notion of worldwide mayhem quite exciting, but hardly compelling. I just couldn’t get into it somehow. It all seemed so sci-fi, and besides, there was the holiday to prepare for. Who had time for the Apocalypse?

There’s an age thing, too. We Baby Boomers have been expecting the world to blow up since the Fifties, when we could be found on any given school day crawling under our desks at the familiar sound of an air-raid siren. We had to ask ourselves, how sturdy are these desks, anyway? And who stuck all this gum under my desk?

I don’t wonder that New Year’s resolutions seldom succeed. We are all in a weakened condition after the holidays, even though, once again, we have failed to blow up.

Here’s another piece of bumper-sticker philosophy: “Don’t Look Back, You’re Not Going That Way.”

Have a good week.

——

(Martha Allen, of Keene Valley, has been writing for the Lake Placid News for more than 20 years.)