An oblate spheroid has spun round one more time and orbited a giant fireball. Due to an arbitrary decision made a millennia ago, you woke up and a new year had begun.
Over the last year practically every cell in your body has been replaced and renewed. You are a new version of yourself but a year older. The atoms that make you up have been around since the beginning of the universe... and still you can't figure out what your new year resolutions should be.
An infinite number of possibilities brought you to this exact moment, most of which are unknowable. I am typing on a computer invented by someone in California, containing precious elements mined in Africa or Asia, which lay buried in the ground for millions of years, drinking a coffee farmed somewhere in South America, in a cup made of earth fired in a kiln, with milk from a cow in England, all made using a machine made of metal dug out of the earth and run using electricity burning in a power station somewhere, I'm sitting in a room where the walls meet at a perfect right angle, built before I was born by a person who was skilled at things I can't even comprehend how to do. All of this is one moment, all of those things took thousands of humans, thousands of years to perfect, it is beyond the imagination of just one person.
We want to see certainty, meaning, patterns, logic and reason, and when we don't the universe seems like it was built on shaky ground.
No i ching throwing, fortune telling, tarot card reading, astrologer will be able to make sense of it for you, there are just too many variables.
All these infinite events will coalesce into moments you will remember over the next year.
Fragments.
Through a grubby bus window the sun will hit the hoar frost on the fields, and for a second the prosaic and poetic collide and everything will seem perfect, as it should be.
Other times. The sun comes up like a piss stain streaked across an old tramps blanket. But you will still get up and start another day.
But most days are in the middle. Most conversations you will forget, in a lifetime only a handful will stick; same with people.
3am and you'll wake up haunted by things that don't matter and somethings that do, and there will be nothing you can do.
Fragments will spin out of your brain; driving into Reno in the sleeting rain, watching a hillside fire in the Mediterranean, standing under an aircraft wing sheltering from the rain, watching the bodies burn at Pashupatinath. What seeps out of your brain will be unique to you and meaningful to you alone.
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| Memories, are they what make you 'you'? |
The year in review, a long list things you've forgotten. Then your own year in review, for me I didn't read Proust or War and Peace, I didn't write a novel, didn't even have an idea for a novel. Didn't start a PhD or MSc in Neuroscience or anything, didn't run more than a few miles, did no events. But then, be kind to yourself. I do live in a great place with a great partner and a great son, I met some good people and had some good conversations; went to some new places. Everyday life is full of highlights, a cup of coffee here, a laugh at work there. These moments form a life.
Don't go in with too many fixed ideas. What you thought were your goals, may not ultimately be the ones you need to pursue.
The only responses that seem to make sense in the face of all this chaos and stuff is to be kind. Be kind to yourself and others, in a world where we are all trying to be happy and make connections.
And gratitude, to be thankful for the little things that make make up each day and manage to puncture through the hardness of it all.
Try and find a sense of purpose in the moment, every moment. This does not mean everything you do has to be imbued with mystical meaning. The fact that the sun comes up, rain falls from the sky and we are in a nondescript corner of the universe where I'm writing this and you are reading this, despite all the other infinite possibilities of things we could have been doing is mystical enough for any one day.
Goals. The Why.
'comfort is overrated' see the video below.
Anything that involves learning something new or doing something new will be uncomfortable. People like the idea of speaking a new language. They can visualize themselves sitting in an Italian cafe conversing with the locals fluently, what they don't want to visualize is the hard slog of remembering verbs and making mistakes. Ultimately they don't want to look or feel stupid, which is probably the main reason most adults don't try new things or learn new subjects, the ego is fragile.
In the words of Zen fella John Tarrant Roshi
"There is no end to the suffering caused by comparison."
Whether that be comparison with others or comparing yourself to what you think you should be.
Why do those new year resolutions fail? Is it because people are stuck in the future goal, they don't like the process, it brings them no satisfaction. There is no real sense of purpose, except some vague idea of capturing their lost youth by weighing the same as they did when they were eighteen. The most satisfied people love the process of training, gym or running or classes, or whatever they are learning or doing.
It's the reason your 1 day or 7 day free gym trial wont work. People who take these out have no investment in the process and 7 days isn't long enough for them to start enjoying it. It is long enough to remind them they can't achieve anything in 7 days, their goal is harder than they thought, will take longer than they thought and involves something they don't get that much pleasure from. It reminds them of their mortality, that life is short and to give up and go and do something they do enjoy doing like watching Netflix or going to the pub.
The guiding lights for the next year:
3 principles as outlined by Richard Nisbett (2015:225) and which underlie Eastern thought:
1) Principle of change: Reality is a process of change. What is currently true will shortly be false.
2) Principle of contradiction: Contradiction is the dynamic underlying change. Because change is constant, contradiction is constant.
3) Principle of relationships(holism): The whole is more than the sum of its parts. Parts are meaningful only in relation to the whole.
Is it worth having a goal, or plans, or resolutions?
Here is a little exchange:
Dizang asked "Where are you going?"
Fayan said "Around on pilgrimage."
Dizang asked "What is the purpose of pilgrimage?"
Fayan replied "I don't know."
Dizang responded "Not knowing is most intimate."
Replace the word pilgrimage in the third line with the word 'goals', or 'resolutions' or 'relationshsips'.
If through all of the information, chaos, infinite decisions, fuzziness and confusion that life throws, you somehow become aware of a clear goal or subject or area of interest or something that sparks something in you; then go for it, cling to that life raft.
The burning questions and ideas that keep coming back to you, they are your life koan. The ones you carry around with you your entire life.
It's up to you, the most important thing is to enjoy the process, to find things that are satisfying, and mostly these are things that are out of your comfort zone. The years are spinning on, you are wearing down, but there are still infinite moments to enjoy, little things. You can always learn and renew.
You don't need to retreat to the woods to 'suck the marrow out of life' or 'to live deliberately', you can do it in everyday humdrum life and make it meaningful. You don't need someone elses list of goals.
And of course, sometimes the best thing to do is binge watch a TV series on Netflix and have a beer.
It's a new morning, a new day, a new beginning, a new moment. It always is.
Happy New Year, have a good 2018 or whichever year you are in.
"Great understanding is broad and unhurried; little understanding is cramped and busy. Great words are clear and limpid; little words are shrill and quarrelsome. In sleep, people’s spirits go visiting; in waking hours, their bodies hustle. With everything they meet they become entangled. Day after day they use their minds. in strife, sometimes grandiose, sometimes sly, sometimes petty. Their little fears are mean and trembly; their great fears are stunned and overwhelming. They bound off like an arrow or crossbow bolt, certain that they are arbiters of right and wrong. They cling to their position as though they had sworn before the gods, sure that they are holding on to victory. They fade like fall into winter—such is the way they dwindle day by day. They drown in what they do—you cannot make them turn back. They grow dark, as though sealed with seals—such are the excesses of their old age. And as they draw near to death, nothing can restore their minds to the light."
- The complete works of Zhuangzi, Burton Watson translation, Ch, 2, p.8Other references:
The idea of infinite unknowable things, pilgrimage quote and John Tarrant quote taken from a day workshop on Freedom & Intimacy by Kevin Jikai Pickard at Zenways.
Nisbett, R (2015) Mindware. Tools for Smart Thinking. Penguin.
