Ventura County Reporter
12/31/09
Resolution lies at the heart of the New Year, in more ways than one. From Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 365 days are resolved into a single year — half a million minutes coalesced into a single, simple summation, a subset of living known, in this case, as 2009.
The measure is an utterly practical interval and an utterly arbitrary abstraction, a circuit that dictates countless rhythms both trivial and profound, only a few of which have anything at all to do with the Earth’s ceaseless diurnal waltz around its host. In truth, the winter solstice, shortest day of the year, would make a more sensible point to begin and end – but then, little of our calendar or culture seems to have derived from purely logical underpinnings.
Thus, as our home races through space, so do we blaze through our year, from one man-made milestone to the next; observing Martin Luther King, romantic love, St. Patrick, the death of the Christ, a nation’s fallen warriors, American independence, the toil of our workforce, the spirits of the restless dead, the spirit of gratitude, the birth of the Christ, and last but not least, New Year’s Eve and Day — the Omega and Alpha of the annual cultural circuit, and a clarion call to both wrap it all up and to get ready to do it all over again.
There is a momentum to the progression — an anticipation that fires both our imaginations and our markets — that culminates in a blaze of consumption that ultimately, like the journey of the earth itself, ends where it began. The largesse of a year’s living resolved into a single wish to do it all again, only better.
It’s that wish that moves us to resolve not merely the sum of days, but more to the point, our personal progress or lack thereof over the course of them. While the end of the year is also regarded as its spiritual climax, in its last chapters – in the journey from gratitude to resolution – there is perhaps a spiritual devolution: from the unequivocal gratitude of Thanksgiving, no matter our state or station in life, to a tension, born of dissatisfaction, that begs resolution. Never mind gratitude for that which we are – next year we resolve to be somehow better: to be thinner, healthier, richer, to be loved, to be free, out of debt, et cetera.
It’s a complex idea, resolution: the end of a thing; the distilling of something from complexity to simplicity; the movement from dissonance to concordance; the declaration of intention; the solution to dramatic tension. At the heart of resolution then, must be the solution to a quandary, a puzzle — and in the cyclic sense of the turning of the annual wheel, then a re-solving of the same state, some basic flaw in the human condition. Each year we face the looking glass that’s represented by the calendar’s end, and in that ritual we find ourselves wanting, often in exactly the same manner as in the year before.
That tendency to find fault, whether in general or at the threshold of the New Year, is an old one. Karl Jung recounts a conversation he had with a Native American chief who observed of the whites, “They are always seeking something . . .. They always want something. They are always uneasy and restless. We don’t know what they want, we think they are mad.” Of course, what the native Americans observed of the whites can now be extrapolated to mainstream worldwide culture, and the question resonates as never before: what do we want? When is enough simply enough? Is not the most profound observance when marking the passage of time simply that we’re fortunate to have the chance to do so in the first place?
In the end, then, never mind the state of our accounts or waistlines. Perhaps the most cogent lesson of the New Year, and in the resolving of the old year, is simply that it’s a grand thing to have ridden the world around the sun once again, and equally grand to commence yet another trip. The notion is akin to the way in which our children delight in the trip of the carousel, around and around, happy to be astride a noble and gaily adorned steed. In the carousel’s turning,v each has an equal chance to reach for the proverbial brass ring – whether or not it’s actually grasped spoils the ride not even a little bit, for they know with every bit of their being that it’s always better to ride, to redeem that ticket and hang on for dear life.
As is so often the case, the child’s wisdom offers treasure in the example for our own. The price of admission is already paid, we hold the ticket in one ready hand – there is little left to do but enjoy the ride, and be glad for every single turning that we’re granted. Some of us might even catch that brass ring this time around.
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