It has been a tradition for me to plan and record my resolutions for the new year, and then to reflect back on them later. I put considerable thought into my resolutions, as you may witness going all the way back to 1999 and earlier —
Rich Geib’s New Year’s Resolutions:
Over Two Decades of Introspection and Desideratum
— but that is during normal times.
This past year has been an abnormal time. How should I live in 2021? What resolutions should I make? Today is December 31, 2020. Tomorrow starts the new year.
I gave much thought to making good choices and maximizing my potential for personal growth in 2020. I like how educator R. Keeth Matheny explains that we can enjoy post-traumatic growth and use all the unstructured time available during quarantine to improve oneself in the following video —
Matheny urges, “Instead of focusing on the things you can’t do, focus on what you can do.” If normal avenues of growing and learning are closed off, find other ways. Matheny urges us not to hibernate like a bear and sleep through the months of lockdown. Instead, he urges us to be like a moth in a chrysalis which is quietly but continually growing, and then after quarantine ends breaks out of the chrysalis as a fully-formed butterfly, which stretches its wings and flies high and far.
That is the way a person should seek to approach quarantine and all the unstructured time it brings, in my opinion. I urged my students to learn something new, if school is mostly closed. (“Use your time. Don’t waste it!”). Similarly, I tried to get my daughters to develop their own passion projects and to pursue independent studies. Learn about photography and how to use a DSLR camera? Take to the ocean and learn to surf? Anime comics and the Japanese language? (“Why not? Go for it!”) I have had mixed success with my daughters. But above all, this is how I’ve tried to live myself. “Non schola sed vita decimos” has been my teaching philosophy: we learn not for school but for life. If the local schools aren’t getting it done, then the parents need to get it done.
But is this a professional or personal philosophy? Am I acting in this capacity as a “parent” or “teacher”? Both? Is there any real line between the two roles? Should there be? I always thought the first and foremost teachers of any child were the parents.
WWAFD? — “What Would Atticus Finch Do?”
I recently read this article about a guy who rode 10,000 miles on his bike during the pandemic. This really struck home; that was my approach also to the unexpected events of this year. Apart from work obligations (which were fewer than normal) and family obligations (more than usual), I exercised almost all the time. I was perpetually sunburnt and the sweat poured off me. When not outdoors, I read semi-continuously. At the end of the year I look back and calculate I read some 51 books in 2020, and gave my daughters little less than an advanced symposium on literature. With either one or both daughters, we waded through the following titles: To Kill a Mockingbird, Ender’s Game, Catcher in the Rye, The Yearling, The Lord of the Rings, 1984, Brave New World, Silas Marner, Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind, The Outsiders, The Notebook, The Fault in Our Stars, and The Great Gatsby. In many ways it has been an incredibly fruitful ten months. We have not been hibernating like bears. Not at all. We have used our time.
My gnarled, disgusting road bike gloves after ten months of intense biking.
My wife tells me that is great for me, but that others are just hanging in there. For them it is not the time for heroics but for just getting through the day. Fair enough.
I have my tennis matches. And I swim laps almost everyday and ride my road bike and do HIIT workouts on my rowing machine. I stretch the sore muscles with some pidgin yoga at night. I have all this cross-training, in addition to my books and my writing; I am self-contained and self-satisfied. I could do this quarantine lifestyle indefinitely. Perhaps this is a trial run for my retirement from teaching in a few years? In a similar way many of my unmarried friends and acquaintances are doing well, but it is harder for parents and children. My family is struggling; the young are struggling.
My daughters are isolated, stagnating, and lonely. Bored and often querulous. It is especially so with my youngest. I remind my daughters that if they’re ever bored it’s their own fault — there is always something new to learn or to do. But such an understanding seems beyond them at the moment.
The outside world has largely been cut away from them during quarantine. For the most part, there are no longer coaches, teachers, or friends for them. So I strive to be not only parent but also teacher, coach, tutor, and friend to my daughters in a time of government mandated “stay-at-home” orders, and this has been nothing less than exhausting. Not infrequently I reflect on the number of years I have until my daughters will be ready to start college. I have given them most of my best energies these past fourteen years, but I grow tired.
Tired. That is how I feel on New Year’s Eve. Tired as a parent but energized in my own life. A strange feeling to end this strange year of 2020.
So these recent atypical times leads me to an atypical list of New Year’s Resolutions. In contrast to past years, I have almost none. But in light of constantly changing events this seems the smart choice.
So much of the past year has seen authorities at various levels changing their minds and policies again and again — our leaders really don’t know what they are doing, and are making it up as they go. That much is clear to me. Will society open up again, or not? Will I be back in my classroom again, or not? Will my daughters be able to go to school and play organized sports, or not? Will they be able to see their friends, or not? Our liberal California politicians have given us some of the most restrictive quarantine rules in the nation, and we currently have the worst outbreak of disease anywhere. Go figure.
So I am mostly done focusing on larger societal concerns. They will figure this shit out when they can. Epidemics in the past did not last forever, and this one will be no different. I will control what I can control, and I will leave the rest alone. So my approach to this next year is this: I will wait cautiously but hopefully, and I will react as events develop and dictate. I will embrace the uncertainty and not get ahead of myself. So I will make almost no formal resolutions for the new year. I will wait and watch. Patience. Next year could hardly be worse than this year, but you never know. We shall see what we shall see.
As a result, my 2021 resolutions page will be much shorter than the more than twenty earlier iterations. Isn’t that as it should be? This past year has been like none other in my life, and I am hardly alone in this. So my resolutions are different. In fact, they are almost non-existent. So be it.
Last night, however, I did write down this goal for next year:
Continue listening to KUSC and KDFC at night. And more Charles Dickens. Live like they did before the 21st century.
Hold onto the community offered by live radio in your evenings. Try never to be so busy that music remains absent from your evenings. The pandemic has taught you to try and exclude digital distractions so that you might spend your evenings as if it were 1930. Quiet evenings, deep thoughts, serious reading, beautiful music, and early bedtimes and wakeups. Continue your march through the novels of Charles Dickens and similar — march step-by-step patiently, and you shall scale the 19th century “large, loose, baggy monsters” over time. Avoid superficial temptations on your time and attention by YouTube or other online interruptions. Focus and reflect, don’t wander or dawdle. Go inside, not outside. There are greater yields that way. Remember the lessons of the pandemic when much of the 21st century was closed down by quarantine and you reverted to the rhythms of previous centuries. Keep it simple.
I hope I can keep that up, even after vaccines roll out and life returns to something more like normal.
This would continue a trend which has been occurring for some years. Back three years ago I gave up my social media accounts, judging them to be more harmful than helpful to me. Continue in this way, if you can. Move away from silicon machines and digital algorithms. Move towards heritable thought and human stories. Be conscious of what you are doing and why. Live deliberately.
Don’t waste time, Richard. Read more Dickens — you’ve only read three of his novels so far. Read all of them! And continue to read with your daughters. They will be off in college soon enough. Listen to more great music with the full attention it deserves in the evening. Don’t use it as “background filler” — concentrate 100% on the music. Get those great workouts during the day which bring you a full appetite for your dinner, and leave you exhausted and asleep by ten pm. Wake up early the next morning feeling rested and ready for whatever the day might bring. Then do it all over again. This is health.
Do not complicate your life, Richard. Go back to what is most important and leave the rest. Eschew stress and conflict. Avoid angry people. Let the assholes be assholes — always and everywhere there are plenty of them, and they won’t change. Embrace the positive instead. Enjoy your days; find peace and contentment. The power to do this is always within.
And when you realize this, as Wendell Berry explains —
“A sure horizon
“Do Not Be Ashamed”
will come around you. The heron will begin
his evening flight from the hilltop.“
by Wendell Berry
