Unbreaking New Year's

In under a week, we will be welcoming in a new year.

I love the sound of that. The idea of it.

A new year is a book unwritten.

It is a journal opened for the first time to soft paper with tooth and texture.

It will hold whatever you record, absorbing it as if to remember. Ink will settle into its fibers.

Whatever you commit to its pages will have a permanence. Once written, they cannot be unwritten.

Someday, it will be a history of a time. First, though… first, it is a blank canvas, primed to receive paint, waiting for whatever you find important to record.

Popular culture reduces new years to so much less than this though. We embrace no opportunity to imagine what we will make of a year ahead - what we want to be or become or do - and instead just dumb it down into self-criticisms disguised as resolutions.

“My new year’s resolution is to [fix or improve or some personal failure].”

There is no hope in it, no joy, no vision.

We quite literally drag our failures forward into a New Year disguised as goals. We take the things that we feel bad about - the things we see as both flaws and the proof that we have been too weak to fix them - and we devote the first beautiful, clean pages to making doomed promises to suddenly erase them.

Who’s freaking idea was that?

Talk about a shitty way to usher in a new year.

Jesus, we just survived all manner of hard things and here we are gifted with the forgiveness of new chances… and we use it to basically say “I have sucked at [something]. My resolution is to not suck this year! No, I mean it this time.”

And no, we don’t mean it and then we’re locked into a gym membership we neither use nor want to cancel because it would be an admission.

A new year is a new journal with clean pages of good paper.

Even if what we write in it falls short of Shakespeare, we deserve to hope it will.

We deserve to enter a fresh year unencumbered by what we think makes us “less than” or “not good enough”.

So, this New Year’s, I will make no resolutions.

I joined a gym on July 4th this year (and then dropped 20 pounds which I have kept off.). I quit smoking one year on my birthday. I made the decision to “be a writer” on November 3rd. A random money. There are no shortage of dates on the calendar we can use to anchor commitments to self-improve. In fact, any date works just fine for those.

New years, though… New years mark having survived a revolution and being graced with the opportunity to begin another. We have literally survived a full revolution around the sun and are blessed with a new one before us.

What the clean, unmarked pages in this new journal will come to contain is up to us… maybe not entirely but at least in part.

2023 may come to be a year we are relieved to usher out or it may be one we are sorry to see go. For now, it is nothing but potential and possibility. And the reality is that most years end up being a combination of both things we’re happy to put behind us and things we wish we could pause to savor.

Even my very worst year - an absolutely excruciating stretch where I buried a friend, my mother-in-law, stepfather, a marriage, and a job all within only three months - was not without some good.

There were memories with my son I will treasure to my very grave. There were lessons learned and incorporated that have made me happier, stronger, more comfortable with myself.

Years are virtually never all good or all bad.

We will survive the bad. We should plan the good.

We should revel in the opportunity to dream about what could be rather - what could be achieved or reached or made - rather than open with a vow to merely not be as bad at something as we were.

And maybe that would actually help make those things so.

This new year, I will make no resolutions. I will devote none of 2022’s remaining minutes to that dumb exercise. I will not catalog the personal failures I wish were already fixed and make forced promises to fix them beginning next Monday.

Instead, I will open a new journal to its first page and write “prologue” at the top.

And then I will write about the many things I hope to make so or see happen this year.

I will write about a first book drafted to the point of being proud of it regardless of whether it has been edited, submitted, or sold a year from now - or will ever be.

I’ll write about travel with my son. Day trips and overnights and road-trips. Drives and time spent on the other side of a flight. France. Or Thailand. Or India.

I’ll write about photography and concerts and another year of combining the two.

I’ll jot little lists in the margins. They will be hopeful and happy… and they will take work to come up with over the remains of this week - because we are not taught to imagine what a new year could be at its best, it’s happiest, it’s most fulfilling.

And I think that should change.

Arriving at the end of a year is an act of survival. Planning the next should be an act of joy.

I have a new notebook to open. I will use its first pages well. And then I will fill in the rest as a story unfolds. Whether it is a tragedy, comedy, memoir, or epic, that we shall have to wait and see.

For today though, it is all of those things and I will look forward to its writing.