Dec 20 2007
The New Year
haha, it’s funny. Seriously, though, it started me thinking about the practice of new years resolutions.
Nearly every culture and most religions, have a specific new years celebration -think Chinese New Year, Rosh Hashanah, Easter (for all intents and purposes). It’s a way to look back seriously on the year past, and to look forward to the new year. You have practices that allow you to repent for your past year and cleanse your spirit for the new one, and practices to help start the new year off right - spiritually.
But New Years always seemed to me to come as a sort of last hurrah after the orgy of christmas. Like, let’s all get plastered and rock on. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had some serious New Years’ too. One time, I went out with a couple friends, we got drunk and talked about lots of stuff and I felt like I sorted out some serious issues I was having at the time. Maybe that was the liquor, though, I dunno.
What I suppose I mean is, I hate new years. I think it’s stupid and meaningless and I don’t even know why we consider it a holiday. When I was little it was fun because I got to stay up late, but now I can stay up whenever I want to, and drink whenever I want to, and see my friends or family pretty much whenever I want to.
New years doesn’t have to be meaningless, but it was always funny to me how after a crappy year, everyone thinks that new years is a chance to start over. In the morning, you’ll have a hangover but your life won’t magically be any different. Whatever was messed up will still be messed up, and even if you’re on your best behavior at first- unless you’ve seriously given thought to how to change your life, in 2 weeks everything will be the same as it was before.
Maybe I’m bitter, maybe I’ve only ever had disappointing new years celebrations. I don’t know. But this year I won’t make any damn resolutions unless they involve things like scheduling a visit to a counselor, solidifying a work-out plan and making a doctor’s appointment. Those are concrete things I can tell myself to do. Unlike, “lose weight, eat better, be a better person,” which are so abstract you can argue over whether or not you’ve completed them all damn year, or put them off indefinitely. Or, I can, anyway.
All I can say is, it’s largely been a crappy year and it promises to stay that crappy next year. The only thing I can change is my attitude.
K.