Happy New Year everyone!
Last month I wrote about the holidays and said the following about New Year’s Eve celebrations:
“I never enjoyed a hard-partying New Year’s Eve staying out late, or the hangover the next morning. But I have enjoyed the past twenty or so New Year’s Eves when I quietly stay at home, think over the past year, and then plan for the future. I write down my resolutions for the new year, go to sleep at a reasonable hour, and wake up refreshed and ready to go the next morning. Hence January 1 is always a good day for me. A new start, a fresh beginning – something we all deserve now and again.”
And so it was for me last night, December 31, 2022.
I have some twenty years of resolutions written down and posted. I started them without thinking too much about it, but the years they have added up!
The resolutions don’t have much value for me as I look back upon them – they are usually short-term goals, rather than long-term. They are relics of a bygone year dealing with bygone concerns. They are like newspapers which yellow with age almost before they throw them away.
But I do find interest in my list of books I’ve read during the year. I read some 35 books or so a year, and these really are sort of an intellectual biography of that year. “What is life but what a man is thinking of all day? This is his fate and his employer,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson claims. So I can look at these books and remember the stories and ideas that filled my mind during that time. I am glad I have a list of these. I read nearly everyday, and my mind is always finding something to learn, but I only read about three books per month, including the ones I read with my daughters. That does not sound like much. But I am not sure I can read more than that. Three books a month?
Occasionally I run across a person who tells me that she reads a hundred or more books per year. I don’t know quite what to say. In fact, I worry they might read too much too quickly, and reflect too little on what was read; that is what happens to me. I wonder if they are like the glutton who eats too much in one sitting, and whose overwhelmed body just passes the food on without absorbing it; I fear reading too much in a binge makes for poor absorption of what was read. I remember reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and that book was a multicourse meal which took me dozens of separate reading sessions over several weeks to complete. I don’t even know how many months that book cost me (one? two?), but I do remember the effort it took to wade through that “loose baggy monster” of a Victorian novel. I would not race to finish it. That large novel took time and effort to read, and time and effort to ruminate on and digest. But I read every single page carefully and it came to an end finally. In retrospect, the whole thing was intimidating: it will be a long time before I try another Dicken’s novel. It was a novel both exhausting and rewarding, but I’m not sure which was the predominant emotion by the last page. Can you read David Copperfield in only a few days? I can’t. I couldn’t.
At any rate, I generally succeed in keeping my New Year’s Resolutions. This is unlike mid-18th century Samuel Johnson, whose prose I always enjoyed, who complained about failing to keep his resolutions thusly when he was already 65-years old:
When I look back upon resolutions of improvement and amendments, which have year after year been made and broken, either by negligence, forgetfulness, vicious idleness, casual interruption, or morbid infirmity, when I find that so much of my life has stolen unprofitably away, and that I can descry by retrospection scarcely a few single days properly and vigorously employed, why do I yet try to resolve again? I try because Reformation is necessary and despair is criminal. I try in humble hope of the help of God.
I love it!
As always, we gain on January 1 a new opportunity to start afresh to try to make our lives by design purposeful (which is easy), and so maybe meaningful (as result of the purposeful), and hopefully wonderful (if we are lucky!).
This simple gift – the opportunity to gain a fresh start – is a blessed thing. It is not to be squandered.
We all deserve a fresh start now and again. Today we have one. 2023 begins right now.
Happy new year everyone!
P.S. Merely saying the number, “2023” is awe inspiring. I remember well “2003” and “1993.” And now it is already “2023.” The idea of the year “2033” is beyond imagining, but I imagine it anyways and know it will be here sooner than we think. Is this what it means to become old? The years they all begin to speed by and blur together?
