Be a new man in the New Year
The road to hell, they say, is paved not only with good intentions but also with New Year’s resolutions. For this is that time of year when good resolutions are pious and plentiful, serious and sincere; for the time being… It is the rest of the year that will demonstrate whether there was any real resolution behind them.
What use is a New Year without resolutions? Backsliding and breaking is only to be expected; it’s a part of human nature. But the real miracle is that, no matter how many times this happens, we are quite undiscouraged and, consequently, we resolve anew. That itself is a good reason to celebrate new beginnings, and new years.
The British humourist G K Chesterton put it succinctly, “The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul…” Maybe that is what we mean when we talk about being born again. It is the turn of the year; a universal urge to look back on what has been and piously resolve to somehow become what one can be, assuming that miracles like that actually happen. Even Scrooge, that embodiment of unfeeling selfishness in Charles Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ felt that uplifting transformation after his trio of ghostly visitors made him a changed man.
But the sceptic and the cynic do not see things quite that way. They see a New Year as merely an opportunity to renew old habits, good or bad. And if one compiles statistics of resolutions left broken at the roadside of the New Year, most of us would be tempted to agree with the persuasions of these Philistines. But the fact is that no one ever made a new beginning without imagining it first. Only if it is possible to imagine a new start does it become possible to make one. But imaginings are not perfect. If as the poet Robert Burns so eloquently said, even the best laid plans (of mice and men) gang aft agley, then what of mere imaginings?
So imagine away and make those resolutions. Some you may keep and others break. It’s okay. A resolution broken once need not be broken forever. As the great King of Scots Robert Bruce discovered when he was in hiding in a cave and watched a spider repeatedly trying to build a web; if at first you fail, try, try again. A resolution broken once or twice initially may be kept subsequently. Finally, it not the purity of your attempt but its overall effectivity that counts. No man is ever wholly lost; (s)he can be saved in an instant. All it needs is the realisation that it’s a wonderful life, and, as the singer Louis Armstrong alias Satchmo sang so movingly, a wonderful world.
The world may be short of those who would effectively reform themselves, but it has never been short of those who would reform others. There are those who may not be good at making New Year’s resolutions for themselves, but they’re more than happy to make them for others. The world could do with fewer of them in 2012. It is the human condition, which always sways between the self and others, the greedy and the generous, the fearful and the hopeful, caution and courage, laughter and sighs, good impulses and bad. One can always feel regret, but remorse is the most wasted of emotions. Is that why it needs to be transformed into resolutions? It is not an easy question to answer. How correct would even the most hopeful, thoughtful and eloquent answer be, if it were not exemplified by how we spend the coming year?
