There’s a sentiment I’ve been seeing more and more lately, which goes something like this; “January first is just a day like any other. And yet we put so much on it — resolutions, retrospectives, predictions and reflections. We pin our lives to an arbitrary date, setting goals too ambitious to achieve, resolving the unresolvable, having insights that we soon forget. We hope one day, fail the next, then fall back into familiar routine for the next eleven and half months. Finally, another year arrives and we do it all again.”
Actually, that’s a more nuanced and generous (and dare I say, poetic) phrasing than what I’ve encountered in the wild. The more common version would be, “Resolutions always fail, so why bother? What’s the point in taking stock one time per year when we all know we can never change anything?”
Whether put bluntly or in more flowery language, there is at least a partial truth here. The cycle of making overly ambitious resolutions, setting unrealistic goals, then forgetting them as rapidly as possible when they prove untenable is, if not a human universal, then something plenty of us have experienced. In fact, for quite a few years now I have been quite purposeful about not committing myself to concrete changes just because another January has rolled around.
But I also believe that the impulse to reflect and hope as one year closes and another begins is not misguided. The trick is avoiding the impulse to translate reflections and hopes into discrete acts you must make in the immediate future. I know conventional wisdom dictates that a goal should be clearly defined in such away that success or failure is obvious, but I think this is a bad fit for something as big as a year. A year is an unwieldy thing, four seasons filled with all the large and small events and changes that make up life. As the calendar turns over we should try to see ourselves clearly before we do anything else.
This has all been a bit abstract, so let me share some of what I’ve been thinking about. For at least five years but with particular acuteness in the past twelve months my sense of my own life has been diverging from my sense of the larger world. I feel very lucky to have a happy and healthy family, good friends, meaningful work, and an active community. At the same time I am aware of a pervasive instability in the world at large.
If I had to pick a particular point on which to hang my concerns I would single out the rate of technological change, which I think is at the root of much economic, political, and social upheaval. It is not that I foresee doom as the inevitable consequence of this upheaval, it is that I can’t foresee anything at all. I have no idea what the next decade will bring, and I don’t believe anyone else does either. The range of possibilities looks broader every day.
You can see how this assessment sharply contrasts with the pleasant predictability of checking my kids’ homework on Monday and shipping off boxes of meat on Tuesday. I feel like things are on the cusp of potentially apocalyptic change, but every day life continues to thrum along, steady as a heartbeat.
Perhaps my low grade anxiety is one common to all parents. After all, I am not particularly worried about what a changing world might mean for me. What I think of when I wake up at two-thirty and can’t go back to sleep is what radical change could mean for my children. It’s possible that, had I lived two decades ago, I would be having the same fears attached to different particulars, since the future has always been unknowable. But I don’t believe this is the case. The divergence between my feelings about my own life and the world at large is sharp and relatively recent. I remember a time, not so many years ago, when they were more nearly aligned.
By now you’re probably wondering what the point of such rumination is. Maybe you agree that trying to fix every little problem on January first doesn’t make sense, but why is it better to have big thoughts about life and the world? This is where I reveal that, as skeptical as I am of resolutions, I do believe in change. The purpose of taking stock of things should be to recognize which of them have value and which would be better to let go of.
The upshot of all my reflections has been a renewed commitment to living in the world as I find it and to spend less time attempting to control the uncontrollable. Perhaps as the year unfolds I will make specific goals, which I might achieve or fail at, but they will not diminish the value of the insight.
As one year ends and another begins I invite all of you to join me in putting things in a larger frame. What you do after that is up to you. Maybe it will just give you a feeling of gratitude for the good parts of your life, or a feeling of sadness for the hard parts. Maybe it will prompt profound and ongoing changes. At the very least it will join you to countless other people who, as they pin new calendars to the wall, are pausing to clear their eyes for a glance behind and another ahead.
