This strange, unfocussed interval between Christmas and New Year seems to depress and disorient a lot of people. In the not too distant past, when we were not expected to be so frantically busy, this whole period was an extended winter festival dedicated to family visits, religious observances, and just having fun. In England in the Middle Ages it was a time of continuous feasting and merrymaking, which never stopped until Twelfth Night, January 6th, the traditional end of the Christmas season. But when the Puritans came to America they put an end to all that. Back to work, they said, and so for many people “The Holidays” are little more than a momentary pause before the relentless cycle of the year starts all over again.
It’s not good enough. We owe ourselves a proper break at the end of December, a huge collective stretch and yawn as the old year ends and before the new one has started. We need time to catch our breath, catch up, take stock of life so far, and make plans for the future.
There are reasons to be anxious about the future, but originality is not one of them. The artificial changing of the calendar makes us feel that something momentous should happen, but it never does. We like to think that we are living in a time of history-making events, but we may be living in a footnote to a book already written. The ancient Greeks believed that history was cyclical: the same things repeated over and over like the programming on commercial television. This is a comforting philosophy. Nothing entirely unexpected can happen, because it has all happened before in the great turning wheel of time. From this perspective, and based on the evidence we have so far, we can expect that the twenty-first century will be essentially a rerun of the eleventh century, when the world was divided into numerous warring tribes, fighting over religion, wealth, and territory, forcing great migrations of refugees, and the Crusades were just getting started. That may sound like irony, but history is not so much ironic as simply repetitive, which is why each New Year surprises us by being very much like the one before. Your iPhone may be updated, but human nature never is.
It’s not surprising that we prefer to ignore the repetitions of history and focus on ourselves. That’s where New Year’s Resolutions come in. Here at least we should be able to take charge of our own personal lives. But so often our mistake with New Year’s resolutions is to make them so punitive and puritanical that they are doomed to failure and we are depressed and defeated before the New Year even starts.
So how about trying something that gives pleasure instead of pain? The etymology of the word “resolution” stems from the Latin verb “solvere,” meaning to loosen or reveal, or set free. Here’s my suggestion. All New Year’s resolutions should be resolutely short term, liberating, and fun. This one is my favorite. Resolve to do something completely new in the New Year. It might be anything, from learning to play the trombone to walking the Appalachian Trail or setting up a home for stray cats. Just do it and, with any luck, history will pass you by.
Copyright: David Bouchier.
