Realization, Not Resolutions

One year and about 6,000 miles ago, I spent a New Year's Day contemplating just how little the passing of the old year meant to me. Admittedly, I was pretty depressed at the time, and feeling profoundly unconnected and lost. A lot has changed in my life since then, and not one iota of it could have been done if I didn't have the most amazing support network, most notably made up of my mom, my boyfriend, and a few very wonderful friends. That said, I have realized that I still don't believe in New Years. Obviously, I don't mean to say that I don't notice the fact that 2010 is over and 2011 has begun.

No, I mean that even though I'm a little financially better off, with better prospects and more experience, and vastly better off when it comes to my personal life, as I have found a true partner in life, of the kind I'd begun to think didn't actually happen in real life, I still don't place any significance on January 1st. I know a lot of people consider it a good day to evaluate and make resolutions, or start fresh, or wash their hands of the old year, but I am just not one of them.

I actually find more comfort in pretty much ignoring all of that. If the New Year is supposed to be a fresh start, then I find way too many things to be well past their expiration, yet still lingering. However, if I look at the things as happening at random, on their own schedules, then I don't have to be upset about a spoiled celebration, or take it as a bad omen that casts a shadow over the year when an unhappy event happens and isn't resolved before midnight on December 31st.

I have a lot of hopes for the coming year, but I won't get to hoping for them in earnest until some things have been dealt with. Processes that were begun last year have yet to finish, and New Year's Eve itself heralded a family sadness that will not be swiftly relegated to auld lang syne.

In the coming year, I expect a lot of big changes, in addition to the ones that took place in the previous year. A lot of them will be related, though, and in my mind, I haven't parceled them up so that they belong to last year - a thing that is over and done.

Vanilla Sky Extract

"Every passing minute is a chance to turn it all around," or so Sofia says in Vanilla Sky. "Minute," she says - not day, or year, or decade, although she could have easily said any of those. She's not the only one who said such a thing. Mahatma Gandhi said, "Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I am reborn."

Today, I'm having a hard time wrapping my mind around these concepts. We mark our lives by the passage of minutes, days, years... and it makes sense. We'd go crazy if we had no system of keeping track of time. That's not the part I don't understand. The thing is, life does not actually happen in these easily-delineated chunks of time. Today is January 1st. Today's date ends in /10, while yesterday's ended in /09. Today, I am a day older than I was at this time yesterday, but yesterday, I was still only a day older than the day before that.

My point is - none of my problems went away because I participated in the ritual of welcoming the new year. I'm not arguing with anyone who embraces a feeling of starting over, a virtual reset button as Danielle suggests. If you are able to feel hope and renewal, please don't take this to mean I'm here to rain on your parade. I'm glad that you can. I'm just saying that I, at this moment, on this first day of this new year, feel no such sensation. The things that made my heart ache yesterday still make it ache today. The things I was worried about yesterday, I am still worried about today. It's just another day that I got out of bed, made the coffee, and started going about my business.

Last year, I felt differently. Last year, I said, "this is going to be the year." This time, I have no expectation that anything is going to be different because it falls between January 1 and December 31 of the year 2010. Things will happen, and they'll last a minute, or 42 minutes. They'll last a day or 87 days, 2 hours, 8 minutes, and 22 seconds. They'll last a year or 3.94 years.

Todd pointed out to me just now that this is why Anniversaries were invented. These allow us to assign an event its own New Year's Day. It's a point, to be sure, but it's the same thing to me. People don't unfailingly die on their birthdays. Relationships don't always fail on the anniversaries of their beginnings. Life just does not happen according to the calendar.

I wish I believed that today's date meant something. I wish I saw that reset button. Instead, what I see are the dishes that were in the sink last year. I have the same hopes I had last year. I am brought to tears by the same things that made me cry last year. So what? Last year was only yesterday and tomorrow won't be much different.