New Years Resolutions

I was trying to figure out what makes me uncomfortable about these the other day - well, not uncomfortable exactly more at a loss as to what they actually are.

A good Wikipedia entry provides some context:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year_resolution

There is a reference to earliest beginnings in 153 BC with the mythical king Janus who, with two faces, was able to look forwards and backwards:

"Janus became the ancient symbol for resolutions and many Romans looked for forgiveness from their enemies and also exchanged gifts before the beginning of each year".

That provides some historical context, which is useful...The sense of trying to reconcile past perceived shortcomings against future good intentions is not a bad way of seeing these "resolutions". And of-course there's a catch...The past is gone, and cannot be brought back, so how does one reconcile past with future? Can't be done...It's an impossible task, recalling Greek mythology again - a sysiphian task:

"I was a smoker yesterday...Tomorrow I will not be a smoker"...Thinking teleogically, picturing the future as a time in which one will have more control, one will be able to make things happen, according to a linear timeline which charts progress, is possible no more than a glorious delusion.

For, surely, human beings tend to behave and interact cyclically rather than teleogically. We tend to chase our own shadows rather than cast new ones.

So, the more accurate verbalisation, according to my theory, might in-fact be: "I smoked a lot yesterday, and tomorrow, hooray, I will not be smoking, but then the day after tomorrow, my old habit might catch up wtih me again, and I could find myself smoking again...Ouch...My optimistic, forward-moving, linear model of human behaviour just collapsed...!"

(And a Happy New Year to you too!)

And yet, and yet...The old/new resolutions keep on coming...

There is a ferocious little corner of one's mind that, only quasi-conscious perhaps, continues to churn them out - and perhaps for this reason: that with sheer force of will, perhaps a daemonic force of will, it might be possible to forge a linear, forward moving, progress-making, model for the rest of one's life. With the aid of a brace of NLP practitioners and a posse of self-help books, inspirational podcasts, and goodly audio books, it might be possible to "become that person I want to be"...

I must, I must, I will I will...

But it needs will...

Which is why so few, so very few, actually succeed in the dangerous game of New Years resolutioning.

But you do find them, one does find them.....Amongst one friends, the lonely long-distance runners, the mid-winter outdoor swimmers, the oatcake munching smilers and hopers...

They stand apart - perhaps they are the Gods, the goodly Januses of our time: have you noticed they are not always the easiest of people to brush against? Focussed, with little time for pleasantries, cognisant of only what they need to be cognisant of, engaged in the nuclear task of fusing the past and the future in to the present. No wonder, now and again, they appear tired and impatient of us lesser mortals...The ones who can't quite hack it, and for whom a promise is as good as the next Friday-night Kebab, or Thursday afternoon ice cream.