River News: Our View

There is something wonderfully peculiar about New Year’s Day.

It arrives every year with great ceremony and very little instruction. There’s no Christmas tree to put up — though we might take one down — or any great big list of gifts to buy. After Thanksgiving’s reflections and Christmas’s family hugs, all that’s left of the holiday is a party hat, and too often we don’t know what in the world to do with it.

Or what we did with it the night before, as the case may be.

Before you even know it, you’ve waded right into a brand new year. You might not like being in it so much, but believe us, it’s better than the alternative. There’s also this nagging sense that we ought to feel different from the way we did yesterday, even if yesterday we were still wearing pajamas at three in the afternoon and arguing with ourselves about leftover dip.

Pretty soon, though, we know what we have to do. We have to make resolutions. It’s a cosmic rule. We have to declare ourselves to be a new man or a new woman. Heck, these days, some men are declaring themselves to be a new woman, and vice versa.

Anyway, we declare this to be THE year we will write that novel, paint the house, take that trip to Timbuktu, or at least research whether there really is a Timbuktu. We sit down and make our list of resolutions, and then check them twice to see if they are naughty or nice — oh wait, wrong holiday — knowing all the while that we are not going to get many, if any, of them done, even though we are most certainly intending to.

Ah, that word, intention. For most of us, the perfect epitaph on a headstone is: So-and-so had the best of intentions. 

Mark Twain, who understood human nature as well as anyone, put it perfectly: “New Year’s Day: Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week, you can begin paving hell with them as usual.” 

There it is, the entire psychological summation of the whole year, summed up in two sentences and packed into one week.

We begin the year literally humming with determination. We resolve to eat better and count calories. We will sleep more and complain less, well, except about our co-workers and annoying cousins. We will read the books stacked on the nightstand instead of adding to the stack. We will take walks and get our 8,000 steps a day. 

We’ll return that email we’ve been meaning to answer for eight months. We will, in a burst of ambition that feels both daring and intoxicating, become better super-versions of ourselves by sheer will of mind.

We get real busy with all that — until right about January 8.

By then, the treadmill looks like a path to nowhere fast. The salad is alarmingly wilted, and, anyway, there’s pepperoni in the fridge just begging to be eaten. It’s even wearing our names. The alarm clock, once an old friend singing us to early morning heights of productivity, feels like an angry bellowing stranger. Or at least a Democrat.

Mark Twain knew all this. He wasn’t chastising human beings so much as he was winking at our predictability. We humans are hopeful creatures. We are also creatures of habit. Just about January 8 is where those two realities collide. 

Often enough, it ain’t a pretty picture.

The writer Bill Vaughn approached the same scene from another point of view: “An optimist stays up until midnight to see the New Year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.” 

Most of us, if we’re honest, occupy the middle ground. We’re neither wildly optimistic nor deeply pessimistic. We’re just — what’s the word? — relieved. We're relieved to be able to turn the page. We’re comforted because whatever the previous 12 months brought — joys, frustrations, routines, curveballs — we can now file it under “last year.” The calendar gives us permission to exhale.

The beauty of New Year’s is not that it magically changes anything. It never has and it never will. The same problems wake us up on January 1. The same bills follow us around the golf course, like a fired caddy who becomes a stalker on the greens. The same aches remind us that we are not 20 anymore. 

And yet, and yet, there’s a not-so-subtle shift inside the room anyway. The past becomes officially past and noticeably so. Its door closes. Over there, the future opens its door a crack wider. There’s a little wedge of light casting out a triangle of hope onto the floor. 

We all inch closer. We’ve got some trepidation, but at least we are no longer preoccupied with that closed door of last year; we’re eager to get to the new one.

Henry Ward Beecher captured that feeling with almost athletic vigor: “Every man should be born again on the first day of January. Start with a fresh page… on the first of January, let every man gird himself once more, with his face to the front, and take no interest in the things that were and are past.” 

There is cautionary wisdom there, especially the last part. Closing the door on the past doesn’t mean forgetting it or pretending it didn’t happen. It simply means putting the year in the proper perspective. It means refusing to drag problems forward as if they were chained to your ankle. The new year is not a trial in which we re-litigate old mistakes. It’s an invitation to walk lighter, to shed the heavy clothes of your burdens.

Benjamin Franklin distilled it even further in his practical way: “Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.” 

That may be the most realistic New Year’s resolution of all. It doesn’t aim for perfection. It doesn’t demand transformation. It just encourages you to walk a little more ferociously toward the wedge of light, to be a little more at ease with yourself and a little more comforting to the people around you.

That’s the part of New Year’s that tends to get lost under the confetti. The holiday isn’t really about grand reinvention. It’s about recalibration and small course corrections. It’s really just about adjusting the strap on the buckle, as Beecher suggested, not replacing the belt entirely.

In communities everywhere, the new year rarely arrives with fireworks. We’re talking here about the figurative kind of pyrotechnics, where major life changes explode and sometimes misfire right above the house. For most of us, the new year arrives instead as quietly as a snow flurry. The neighbor will still wave as he passes by. The bank clerk will still smile and give you a lollipop, if you want one. Life resumes, as it always does, not with a bang but with a rhythm.

There is security in that, and a lot of hope if we see it for what it is, a set of days in which to strive to be just a little bit better human beings.

So perhaps the best way to greet the new year is not with a list of demands we place on our shoulders, but with the posture of an unburdened back as we tiptoe toward the new year’s ever-widening door. Let it be the posture of curiosity, not anxiety. Let it be the posture of hope, not fear. 

If resolutions help, make a few. If they don’t, don’t. The year will gallop by either way. What matters more is how we run with the calendar. Hopefully, with humor about our human limitations, with generosity toward one another’s imperfections, and with the quiet confidence that improvement doesn’t have to be dramatic to be real.

New Year’s does not ask us to become someone else, and that’s because that’s not what our loved ones and neighbors want. They only want us to show up again and to be with them, a little wiser, a little more light-hearted, a little more willing to try once more.

And if by January 8, we’ve already paved a small stretch of Twain’s road, well, there’s always next January. The saving grace of any new year is that, soon enough, it will be the past year, too, and a new door will open with its beckoning light. 

In the meantime, enjoy embarking on another entirely new journey. Just make it as far as you can to Timbuktu, and go no farther. All the rest will take care of itself.

Happy New Year from all of us at The Lakeland Times and The Northwoods River News.