Dec 30, 2007 - 10:27:47 CST
Normally, I don’t make much fuss over New Year’s resolutions. It’s hard not to feel cynical — or hopeless — as the fitness clubs fill up in January and Nicoderm sales skyrocket. About this time of year, the talk shows devote a segment to New Year’s resolutions.The psychologists explain that over-heroic resolutions usually lead to failure, followed by lowered self-esteem. So far from propelling us to the life we envision, they say, unwise resolutions actually represent a spiritual setback precisely at the time when the new year begins. The experts advise us to make our resolutions reasonable and achievable. Smoke a little less. Take a walk now and then. Call it a day after four beers. Phone your mother from time to time.
Nuts to that. I want the moon. If I’m not going to strive to be something bigger, better, bolder and more beautiful than I am, then it would be wiser to use 2008 to come to terms with the mediocrity of my life and the crowdedness of what the medieval Christians called this “vale of tears.” What’s the point of resolving to eat less pizza?
There’s an episode of “Frasier” in which the “lovably pompous” radio psychiatrist is rumored to have died. Insisting that he is unambiguoulsy alive, thank you very much, Frasier writes out a series of resolutions for the second half of his life. They include writing the great American novel, retracing the Lewis and Clark expedition on foot and running a marathon. Well, you know the rest. The nature of comedy is the collapse of our dream of life. Comedy is pratfall.
I’m 52 years old. Time is no longer wantonly abundant for me. I’m not prepared to accept the collapse of my dream of life.
Are you?
Two days to New Year’s 2008. There’s still time.
After years, even decades, of failed resolutions, I’m still willing to resolve boldly and fail, because the reverse, to vow merely to keep up with the laundry, means that life is really about paying bills, returning calls, mowing the lawn and making sure the oil is changed in the car every 3,000 miles. We humans are the very top link in the chain of being — curious bipeds with opposable thumbs and the capacity to write symphonies and invent the artificial heart. So we cannot be content just to be and get by. Isn’t it our duty, as the creature uniquely suspended between apes and angels, always to want to be more? Do more? Achieve more? Create more? See more? Dream higher?
We all know that New Year’s Day is an arbitrary notch on the Gregorian calendar and that different cultures, most famously China, bring in the new year according to an entirely different schedule. Arbitrary or not, it makes perfect sense to step back from life at this dark, cold, gray and windswept moment of the year, and ask ourselves who we are, how well we’ve been doing, what we want (or still want) from life, and how we expect to get there given the tools we have at our disposal.
Many people are content with the trajectory of their lives, which is, I suppose, the definition of happiness. I certainly don’t begrudge them their peace of mind, but I know — when I am completely honest — that I’m not one of them. I wear a hair shirt to the circus, the award ceremony and the New Year’s Eve party. When I look in the mirror I see ... well, less than my dream of life. So the choice for me, and for the millions like me, is: shrug your shoulders and accept that things are not what you envisioned in your romantic youth, or try harder. Much harder.
That’s where New Year’s resolutions come in. First, figure out what we want from life. Second, find the Archimedean lever that will make it happen. One of my heroes, Henry David Thoreau, concluded Walden with, “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” Easier said than done. I have a closet full of resolution wear and a garage full of resolution gear. The other day, I read that most home exercise equipment is never used and yet never sold or discarded. Every time I walk by my floor loom, I blush. (At the time, it seemed like a good idea.) They were not apparently intended to be mere furniture. I have a whole drawer full of dental floss.
I’m glad 2007 is over. It was a pretty blah year. I’m looking forward to 2008. It’s going to be my best year yet.
Meanwhile, I am taking New Year’s very seriously. I’ve been going over my list in my head for the past couple of weeks, and I’ve resolved to put it to paper sometime in the next couple of days. Whether that actually happens will tell me a good deal about 2008.
This is an especially important New Year’s. 2008 is a leap year — one more day to try to achieve something, anything. 2008 will be not only an election year, but a pivotal election year in American history. The next president might well be a woman or an African-American. Either of those outcomes would make 2008 a landmark year in American history. The next president is going to have to extricate us from Iraq without letting that withdrawal be (or appear to be) a moral and geopolitical disaster for the United States and its interests.
Question: Who would actually want to be president, and why would we trust a person with such a warped view of his or her capacities in the face of the intractable problems of our times?
We have to decide in the next couple of years whether we are going to have a national health care system or continue our patchwork arrangement, which leaves 40 million uninsured and is bankrupting the Detroit auto industry, among others. The next president is going to appoint at least two Supreme Court justices, and probably more. The implications of those appointments are incalculably large — for abortion, for affirmative action, for what we used to be able to count on as separation of church and state, for the sanctity of the human rights tradition in an age of terrorism.
For these and other reasons, 2008 is a watershed year.
And here it comes, like it or not. My list of resolutions is long, as well you might expect given my general longwindedness (that’s one of them!). I’m thinking of creating an Excel chart. But reduced to general terms, they look something like this in 2008. Say yes to life. Stretch thyself — and reach. Strive to be fully present. Say yes to love. Demand more from the nation that has been billed as the world’s “last best hope.” Master your body lest it master you. Try never to settle. Slow down enough to ride time, rather than be ridden by it.
Call Mother from time to time.
The choice is simple. Run that marathon. Or just order another fleischkuekle.
(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at jeffysage@aol.com.)
Captain Crunch wrote on Jan 2, 2008 6:32 AM:
"χαμένος - Taxus sp." wrote on Jan 1, 2008 10:43 PM:
A faithful reader wrote on Dec 30, 2007 12:40 PM:
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