... Give 2008 Something to Remember Me By ...

As much as we say we don't like resolutions, we make them anyway. I think we all do. The urge to reflect at the start of a new calendar year seems completely appropriate to me, and such reflection naturally sits with and leads into an act of resolution, whether explicit or implicit. Some of us resolve through hoping, looking forward at the future and praying for the best that is yet to come. Some of us go a step further and predict, we look into our own personal crystal ball and tell of our own futures, tell of the future of our worlds. Full resolving - "I will quit stubbing my toe on the same piece of furniture every week" - seems to me to be a combination of hope and prediction with a third ingredient, a promise of action, thrown in.

But there's another emotion, another sentiment, another half-action that seems understandable at the onset of a new year: fear. I wonder if we emphasize the hoping and the wishing and the resolving in an effort to push our fears aside, if only for a moment, to suppress them and displace them. No one wants to admit that peace in the Israeli and Palestinian conflict seems a long way off, but most of us fear that that is the case. And underneath all of those personal resolutions runs the fear that, by 2010, we will still be stuck in the same dead-end job, or we will still be living paycheck to paycheck. We fear that we'll still drink too much and too often alone, we fear that we will still be smoking, maybe even smoking more (when we already smoke too much).

We fear that all the parts of ourselves we deem lesser and imperfect are etched too deeply, and that time's ability to eat away at and erode isn't enough to take away our habits, our anxieties, our flaws. We fear that our willpower is not willful enough and our strength not strong enough. We fear that 2010, 2011, 2021, 2061, that all of the rest of these years we have are already largely written, our lesser selves riding a current too heavy to turn back by force alone.

But resolutions have the best chance of manifesting themselves and seeing themselves through if we know what lies underneath them, if we're unafraid to see the ugly driver in the car closing in on us. Somewhere in our fears, as a bit of their substance and their presence, sits the very possibility of their overthrow. So if I'm making a resolution on this New Year's Eve, it's really a resolution to be unafraid to be afraid, and to be unafraid to look into that fear and see what it's all about.




Yeah, because that's just what I need, to become more self-critical, to increase the amount of self-inflicted analysis I put on myself...

Happy New Year everyone!!!