A Spoonful of Sugar: How re-watching "Mary Poppins" helped me set my New Year's Intentions
The legendary all-powerful nanny has much more to teach us than the importance of being neat and tidy.
Yesterday afternoon on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 2023, I convinced my partner to watch Disney’s 1964 movie musical “Mary Poppins” with me. While we don’t have kids of our own, we like watching cartoons, including movies and TV shows that are traditionally aimed for children. I have also been spending quite a bit of time over the last several years reflecting on my own childhood and how it informs who I have become as an adult. These two factors, combined with an urge to set a New Year’s intention, led to the modern equivalent of pulling out the dusty VHS, rewinding the tape, and pushing it into the slot (we searched for it on Disney+). Luckily for me, my partner was willing to go on this nostalgic Disney ride with me.
Resolutions vs. Intentions
Before I get to the many pearls of wisdom I was able to pull from this film, I’ll take a moment to review the practice of setting a New Year’s Intention. You might have heard of setting a New Year’s Resolution, which many people are tempted to do by year’s end in the hopes of starting the next year on a positive and productive note. I’m not going to bash the practice of the New Year’s Resolution—if you find it helpful and rewarding, go for it—but I have not personally found resolutions to be worth the trouble of setting them in the first place. Invariably, if I’ve told myself this year I’m going to get in good physical shape, eat healthier, read more books, or take up a creative hobby, I tend to feel disappointed in myself if I’m unable to meet that resolution or goal by the end of the year.
On the flipside, a New Year’s Intention can be more broad and general, allowing for more flexibility and on-the-go adjustments as the year unfolds. While resolutions can be rigid, come from external factors and add unnecessary pressure to our lives, an intention is a conscious shift in your internal experience. According to Merriam-Webster, the definition of an intention is “what one intends to do or bring about; a determination to act in a certain way.”
Self-Love as Self-Care
Prior to watching “Mary Poppins,” my New Year’s intention was to practice putting my emotional wants and needs ahead of others’ as a self-prescribed antidote to decades of living with low self-esteem and chronic people-pleasing behaviors. In a modern age filled with neuroticism and disappointment due to the unrealistic expectations our society, families, and our own selves place on us, radical self-love bordering on selfishness felt like the best way for me to start to break out of old habits. While one of my 2024 intentions remains to stay true to myself and learn to trust and follow my own intuition (part of why I’m writing this blog, as think-pieces for myself and others where I used to use web articles like this to seek external validation), watching “Mary Poppins” helped to add a missing and crucial ingredient: a spoonful of sugar, aka compassion and empathy.
Mary Poppins: A Masterclass in Social Psychology
The 1964 film adaptation of P.L. Travers’ 1934 novel—which I am now interested in re-reading—is incredibly perceptive and emotionally intelligent, especially for its time. The story and the characters’ complex psychology almost remind me of an Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen novel, rich with ideas about the internal and external factors that shape upper-class families in Edwardian-era London. I could write an entire 2,000-word essay about the themes of this material, especially around concepts from a Psychology 101 course on attachment theory, early childhood development, groupthink, and the family systems theory. If you are a parent or planning to become one, I would highly recommend watching this movie and studying it objectively, as it has some great parenting tips. For the sake of finishing this blog post, I’ll focus on two key songs from the movie and my interpretation of them as an adult viewer.
2024 Intention #1: To add a spoonful of sugar, aka a positive attitude, to difficult situations
To be honest, I don’t think I understood the meaning behind “A Spoonful of Sugar” as a kid. I was jealous of Mary Poppin's ability to clean up the childrens’ room with the snap of her fingers, and to turn their medicine into a delicious dessert-flavored treat. I kind of understood that if you turn a chore into a fun activity, it will be less arduous and more rewarding to complete. Gamification is actually a helpful tool for kids and adults living with ADHD—I’m currently writing this post with a timer to give myself a deadline to work against, and to give myself a hit of dopamine (our brain’s chemical reward for task completion) when I can cross it off my list for the day.
Aside from making chores less painful, there is a more philosophical point to “A Spoonful of Sugar,” which didn’t click for me until I watched the children’s father, Mr. Banks, undergo an internal transformation. After being fired from his job at Dawes, Tomes, Mousley, Grubbs Fidelity Fiduciary Bank (hilariously run by an elderly Dick Van Dyke in heavy prosthetics and his sycophant sons), we get a brief reprise of “Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” as Mr. Banks laughs hysterically and takes light of the situation. “Mary Poppins was right!” he exclaims giddily, after spending most of the film trying to restore a patriarchal sense of order and decorum in his household.
As an adult, I find myself siding more with Mr. Banks in realizing that life is a bitter pill to swallow. Many moments in our lives are full of discomfort, disappointment, and suffering, and these situations are often outside of our control. If life can often be a bitter pill, then sweetening it with some sugar—a positive attitude—will cut some of the bitterness. When life gives you lemons, add a spoonful of sugar and make some lemonade. The message is deceptively simple, yet difficult to use in practice. By using a song that often gets stuck in my head, I can use its chorus to remind myself that not only could things be much worse, but that my own response to a difficult situation can soften its impact and make life more pleasant overall.
2024 Intention #2: To feed the birds, aka commit acts of selflessness and treat others with kindness and compassion
In a movie that teaches children about empathy and compassion, this song really crystalizes that message. This song still gives me chills, and watching the film with subtitles gave me more insights from the lyrics. From the fourth stanza:
All around the cathedral, the saints and apostles
Look down as she sells her wares.
Although you can’t see it, you know they are smiling
Each time someone shows that he cares.
As the camera pans down from the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral to the steps where the “little old bird woman” sits and feeds the pigeons, there is an obvious connection between this woman’s selfless acts and the kind of behavior that is rewarded in most formal religions. The woman’s actions are virtuous because they come from a place of compassion for others. Sure, she might take a small percentage of the tuppence that people give her for overhead or to make more bags of birdseed, and yet the goods that she provides will allow other people to be selfless, too. There is a much larger discussion about empathy to have here, which I will likely cover in more depth in the future, but the main point is that it feels good and helps us when we treat others with kindness and compassion. While the ability to experience empathy is partially engrained and part of our unique brain chemistry, the ability to do so is only 10 percent genetic, meaning that 90 percent of the time, the trait can be learned.
What Do These Intentions Mean? How Can I Apply Them to My Own Life?
If these intentions are vague and confusing, it’s because I’m trying to adhere them to songs from a popular children’s movie musical. Here is the simplest versions I can come up with:
In 2024, I intend to:
Trust my own intuition, especially when it comes to honoring my own needs and desires.
Adopt a positive attitude, especially when dealing with situations that make me uncomfortable or upset.
Treat others with kindness and respect, especially when interacting with people who don’t share my values or perspective.
What are your New Year’s Resolutions or Intentions? If you want to name them out loud to help legitimize them and hold yourself accountable, feel free to comment below or on social media. I plan to write these down in a journal or sticky note in several places as a self-reminder.
Happy New Year, and remember to treat yourself with kindness and compassion today and every day!
With gratitude,
Michaela
Love it! I’m a big fan of intentions over resolutions. Like you, I am also always working toward trusting my own intuition. It’s something that seems like it should be easy, but I haven’t found it to be. I’m a month late but… resting more is something I’d like to do. (Also, I’ve never seen this movie… but I’m tempted now.)