New Years, and the Revolving Resolve

Copyright © 2018

by Ralph F. Couey

"To have the kind of year you want to have

something has to happen that you can't explain

why it happened."

--Bobby Bowden

The earth has complete one more orbit around the sun, a digit has been added to the calendar, and with the roar of fireworks, a new year is upon us.

New Year's is a neat way to draw a line between the past and the future, a time when it becomes somehow convenient to redraw our lives along what we hope will be happier and more prosperous times.  When the clock's hands point straight up on that night, it is a moment when hope becomes somehow palpably real, as if we could take it in our hands, stroke it gently, and feel the joy of a perfectly unsullied moment.  The year past is seen as old and broken, something without value to be cast aside in favor of the shiny new future. And yet, as the patterns of the past have shown, most times we find ourselves at the end of that new year, essentially in the same rut we were in before.

Resolutions are made every year, and every year remain unfulfilled.  All those wonderful changes we intended to make become lost in the return to the post-holiday routine.  The passion and energy we were planning to use in pursuing the new us somehow is drained in the long, dark tunnel of January, February, and March.  Anyone who has belonged to a gym sees this graphically manifested in the flood of new members during January, few of whom remain by Valentine's Day.  For some, the resolutions were set too high.  For most of the rest, I think we find we're comfortable being who and what we are, unwilling to vacate that safe little box and voyage into uncharted territory.  At the end of the year, we do see changes, but they are almost always small and inconsequential.

There are those, however, who make those resolutions, and stick by them.  They are the ones who, come spring, discover that their summer clothes are suddenly too big; or that they find themselves in a better work situation; or really do learn how to treat people nicer.  Those people (and we all have them in our lives) we find admirable.  We also find them extremely annoying, because whatever the "it" was that kept them motivated, is missing inside ourselves.  

In truth, one doesn't need a calendar date, however neat and easy, to undergo change.  It has long been my practice to set my resolutions, not in the dark of mid-winter, but in the bright warmth of spring.  The earth is coming back to life all around, and I am motivated to actually get things done.  But I understand that starting a new life is harder for most in May than on January 1st.  After all, nearly half the year is gone already.  Most companies and governments have fiscal years that begin and end at other times of the year.  There's no reason why a person can't have a resolution year that begins and ends other than on New Year's.  

Our calendar is driven by a complex web of movements in space.  The moon has four phases that make up a month.  The earth makes a lap around the sun, and that becomes a year.  But space has no fixed reference points.  While the earth and moon make their revolutions, our solar system is gliding around the middle of the galaxy, which is also in motion with other galaxies in a complex gravitational dance while arcing out from that point in space and time when the big bang brought it all into existence.  In fact, if you spent two weeks sitting in your house, you might think you didn't go anywhere.  In actuality, because of all those planetary and solar motions, you actually traveled some 909.6 million miles, but without earning any frequent flyer points.

So there really isn't any fixed point in space or time where we can truly point to as a beginning or an end.  So also, there isn't any fixed point where a life change is required.  It can happen whenever you want it to happen.  And that's the crux of this matter.  In order to make change, it must be because you want change, not because of a convenient day on a calendar.  If you truly want to alter your life, then all you need is supreme motivation and the personal courage to see it through.  You need to feel uncomfortable with your comfort zone.  Then, and only then, will the resolution become reality.

In the end, we all want to be in that moment of realization next December 31st that we didn't waste the year; that we used the time we were given to its fullest measure.  That we finally recognized how much control we do have over our destiny, and that failure of any kind, and success of every kind is not the fault or gift of anything or anybody else...

But us.