on resolutions
Let me start by wishing everyone a belated happy new Gregorian year. The history of years is itself a fascinating thing; perhaps that’s something to add to the ever growing list of things to consider and look into and read about.
There is a beguiling arbitrariness to where we set the beginnings and ends of years. If the orbit of the Earth around the sun were a perfect circle (which it isn’t), then there would be no one point on its orbit that would be distinguishable from any other point and the arbitrariness would be complete. But even with the orbit of the Earth being (essentially) an ellipse, there are distinguishable points on its orbit (from the lore of conic sections), but these aren’t the points we’ve chosen. And so there is something to look into here.
But that’s something for another day. There is a cultural tradition of sorts to set resolutions for the new year, changes of behavior that we wish to implement for ourselves.
We begin the year with the resolutions fresh and bright in our minds, but like a beleaguered prime minister in a race of endurance against a head of lettuce, they fade quickly as the days pass.
As we stand here on the verge of the second week of the new year, it makes some sense to ponder this cultural tradition. I have a few resolutions that are already fading, and I suspect that others might as well.
One thing I’m querying is this habit of making resolutions at a point in the year when we tend to be busy with things, family visits for instance and other calls on our time. Changing habits is difficult. Introducing new habits bring with it one set of challenges, while breaking old habits brings a different set of challenges, and those two sets of challenges are somewhat orthogonal.
And all we can do is to work through them. For me, going back to a recent piece, I’m trying to start over. I’m taking the projects I’ve given myself over recent years and I’m conducting an inventory of what should remain on the list and what should be left off. And so I’m giving myself some time and some space to decide, what are my resolutions for the year and what are then my projects that will arise from these resolutions.
And one of the difficulties with this is that I keep finding things that are interesting, and I keeping being reminded that finding and asking an interesting question (going back to the above) is far easier and far quicker than answering those questions, and so do we begin the new year.
multijimbo 