Happy New Year! This is the day we look forward and contemplate the year ahead, making resolutions about the changes we’d like to make and planning for the future.
Along with the custom of making New Year’s resolutions is the custom of saying that they are futile, what with the bondage of the will and everything. But we don’t have to invest them with big moral significance, nor turn them into grandiose self-improvement exercises with little chance of lasting. Changes happen over the course of the year, and we might as well direct a few of them.
For example, each year I have always made a New Year’s Resolution to keep my desk at work clean. I managed for a week or two, and then it got cluttered again. But that week or two it was clean, and that was something! Still, I always felt bad about the state of my desk. This year, though, my resolution will finally be fulfilled. Now that I’m retired, I have no desk! I don’t have to feel bad about it anymore! Not because of my willpower but because my situation is so radically changed. (Maybe Heaven will be something like that.)