New Year is a time when it is common to make resolutions about how to make a better life for yourself by be(com)ing a better person in one way or another. People often decide that they will give up something (smoking, drinking, for example) or work harder, or do things differently. And it is a truism to say that most people find that by the end of January their New Year’s resolution has disappeared along. They are eating, drinking, bingeing as much as ever before and either still working too hard or still not working hard enough or smart enough.

But I was struck, this year, by the New Year’s resolution of a friend, who wrote that she has resolved to try to value the things she already did and not try to do more. This seemed to be a way of, in Adam Phillips’ book’s title, Going Sane. Valuing what we already do may seem easy, but it is, in practice, difficult. So many people are used to undervaluing themselves and/or not being valued by others. And trying to be better, thinner, more efficient, trying to ‘turn over a new leaf’ may be, in part at least, an attempt to make others look after or love you more. We feel unloved, unattractive, unwanted, uncared for and we blame it on ourselves — so we make a New Year’s resolution. I’ll become more like that, we say to ourselves (though maybe not consciously), because then maybe we’ll be more loveable.

What we mean, underneath, is that perhaps if we change the self that we dislike, or even hate and detest, then maybe we could love ourselves more.

Maya Angelou, the black American poet, quoted an African saying, ‘Never take a shirt as a present from someone who has no shirt him or herself’. She elaborated on this saying, explaining that it means that if you can’t love yourself then you can’t love another person.

There are different kinds of love, however, and it maybe that not loving yourself does not prevent you offering love of a kind to another person. That love may be in the form of looking after them, trying to second guess their needs, or it may be in the form of clinging to them asking them to look after you. Both these may be ways of trying to fill in the gaps in your own self-care. If you look after someone else enough, then maybe they will realise that you need looking after too. If you cling to another person, maybe that person will protect you in your vulnerability.

But love for others in relationships of equality, when you can love yourself comes from a different place, from a kind of expansiveness, an adult version of yourself when you can take care of yourself and that gives you space to care for others and to be simultaneously dependent on them while they depend on you.

And this brings us to the question of self-care — can you be said to love yourself if you can’t take care of yourself and here I am talking about taking care of yourself in the fullest sense. Finding the time and space just to be rather than to do is an important part of this, but doing that, paradoxically, doesn’t need to take up all your time. The odd moments in a day when you can be mindful of what you are doing, the smells, the sensations, the flavours, the colours may be enough to be going on with. You can do this while you are doing some of the usually mindless things of every day life — drinking a cup of tea or coffee, brushing your teeth, or taking a shower, for instance.

But maybe even resolving to be mindful in small ways is falling back into the trap I started this piece with. So maybe the best thing we can do for ourselves, in caring for ourselves and others, would be to learn to value not only the things we already do, but also our own, unique ways of being in the world and connecting with others.