A new year has arrived, and it brings with it the promise of change and the unsettling hope of the future. Every new year we set out to explore this uncharted land with resolve, or at least we try to. We resolve to go to the gym more, to quit smoking, to take that trip, or call those friends (I've long resolved to start a blog, for example). So we engage in a kind of self-diplomacy, full of concessions and mandates, to break all of our bad habits and read all of those books. Sometimes we triumph, often we falter, and usually we become entrenched in the present to await the on-coming future of the next new year. We resolve to be more resolute, or we resolve to stop resolving all together. Regardless of success we view these resolutions as offerings to the future, totems and sacrifices placed at the alters of the people we hope to be someday. However, as I spend more time looking back I realize that resolutions aren't really about our future, they're about our past.
There's a quote that has been orbiting my mind as of late. It's the opening line of a book that, I suppose appropriately, I've been meaning to read. A book that maybe I'm a little afraid to read, because it's about a man looking back on his own life.
"The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there." - The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley
The past is indeed a foreign country, a place where we aren't citizens. Not anymore. We can visit, we can tell stories and show pictures, but we can't live there. And even if we could, we wouldn't really fit in.
We've all had to leave the past for the future. Some of us are emigrants who set our sites on the horizon with dreams of a better life, some of us are refugees forced by cataclysm in to strange surroundings. But no matter how we arrived here there was a moment, either calm or hurried, where we had to decide what we would bring with us and what would be left behind. And there will be that moment again tomorrow as we pack up and head for the next crossing.
That's what resolutions are, you see, the things that we choose to take with us or leave behind. Often they are the things that we don't want to abandon, but should. Things that once were but can't be anymore, or things that we always hoped would be but will never come to pass. Those are often the hardest to leave behind because we are so enamored with them. They are so grand and beautiful and huge and heavy all at the same time.
More important are the things we must leave behind. The things we carry not because we love or need them, but because it feels like we've always had them. Ill-fitting but sentimental things. Comfortable miseries and familiar hatreds. Dense and dirty stones that we drop in to our pockets simply because they are from a place where we once were.
As we get older, though, it gets harder to leave things behind. Even the ugliest, most useless, most unwieldy things take on a kind of value. And if we manage to drop these things, we soon wonder if it's best to leave them be or to go back for them because the longer we wait the harder it is to remember where we left them. Or maybe someone stops us, maybe there's an arm across the chest and a voice saying "You can't go back there, it's not safe."
So we leave them behind and cross your fingers that you won't need them in the future. But if we've chosen well we will be relieved because the things that we truly need take up little space and weigh much less than the things we didn't. If there's something we've lost, something we meant to keep but had to leave behind, hopefully we can find people who will share what they have kept.
I don't know if I'll keep writing this blog, or if I'll ever read that book, but I hope maybe I've shed some of the things I didn't need. And I hope that the things that I have held on to will help me and others make a new home in the future.
So Happy New Year, everyone.
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