Further Thoughts on the New Year

A further thought that occurred on an airplane regarding on our celebrations and observances of the new year, lest you think me so disagreeable to even deny the existence of a long-standing holiday in the human tradition:

From the practical, Getting Things Done™, Lifehacker, and “Chuck” standpoint, making use of the new year to set habits and goals makes perfect sense, especially if one has a concrete, tangible, measurable goal. I want to lose 20 pounds by the end of 2013 – on December 31, 2013 I’ll know if I had the willpower, dedication, self-control and good fortune to lose 20 pounds (fear not, a hypothetical concern). Or perhaps I want exercise more and set a goal of running at least three times a week. On December 31st I will have a clear, measurable goal of my success in that endeavor.

The year thus serves as a measurement, providing a fixed, universal way of calculating progress. These metrics are certainly useful as motivational tools. Only made 125 runs out of the 150 run target? Lost 14 of the 20 pounds? Only got through Philippians in your Bible reading schedule? You now have a measure of your progress and areas where you need to improve in the coming year.

This is good and fine, where we tend to go wrong is setting unrealistic goals and failing to implement any sort habit forming system to see them through. An entire business of life coaches, websites, “lifehacking” programs and whatnot have sprung up to provide assistance in these areas. These are good and well as long as they are applied properly. One can determine weight loss – one cannot so easily measure “being a better person” or “growing spiritually.”

The New Year

I confess I have never been one much for celebrating the arrival of a new year. Perhaps because our family was never good at staying up and (still) places very little significance on the holiday, perhaps because I can’t find a particular reason to care. It seems reasonable to mark the occasion – humanity has survived yet another year of ourselves, the earth is still rotating around the sun and nuclear war hasn’t destroyed us yet (69 years running since the start of the Cold War!). But I have always failed to understand the deep significance of “new beginnings” that many people seem to attach to the holiday: resolutions, new promises of health, wealth, & resolve to make the changes you’ve never been able to make before. Like Mr. Winchester, I find it all somewhat suspicious malarkey that we obsess over the opportunities for self-help and improvement that a new, artificially insisted calendar year brings. As Death Cab for Cutie so succinctly notes: “So this is the new year, and I don’t feel any different.”*

This is not to say I oppose resolutions and fresh starts. Mankind has not improved with age, as much as the various dreams and enlightenments and especially the ideologies of the 19^th and 20^th century worked their destruction. We continue to make mistakes and have failings and gain wait and distract ourselves from things we at least pay lip service to in our hearts, but neglect in our lives and habits. These failings we should reform, improve, progress, &c. But there are limits.

Right before Christmas break my tenth grade students read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Earth’s Holocaust,” as part of our study of the Second Great Awakening and various reform movements in the 1820s and 30s. Religion, morals, alcohol, intemperance, diet; nothing was left untouched by the Shakers, Quakers, Revivalists, Mormons, Unitarians, and Misters Kellogg and Graham. Hawthorne shows how hopeless attempts to remove negative elements from society, whether alcohol, religious trappings, misguided philosophies, or even plain old luxury are; not for lack of effort or intent, but for the lasting permanence of the human heart. The reformers burn everything they can: the liquor, the tobacco, the books, the guns, the swords, the vestments, the marriage certificates; everything is purified by holy fire until only people themselves remain. The horrors of 20^th century communism, socialism, fascism, Nazism and et. al. have shown us the terrible futility of doing away ourselves.

Clearly there is a difference between desiring to reform mankind, and say, hoping to lose 10 pounds or practice the violin more. One universal, the other particular; though both spring in a certain sense from the same discomfort with ourselves and others. What is it then about the new year that makes our discomfort any different? I can go to a bookstore any day of the year and find books on becoming a better teacher, father, student, youth group leader, boyfriend, executive, church leader, dater, family leader, neighborhood leader, jogger, or cook. The aisles are filled with suggestions and tips for every problem I know I have, and then those I didn’t know about. Something I don’t like? Fix it! Lonely? Online dating! Bored? Write a novel, learn a programming language, take up knitting! What I don’t understand is why the change of a somewhat artificially defined calendar suddenly makes everyone pay attention when the whole universe is trying to help us change 24/7 (lots of love, Lifehacker!).

Okay, first of all I’m not that serious about the unnaturalness of January 1^st (why not the winter solstice?), but I can't help but feel a little uncomfortable when people express more resolve on January 1st than they do at Christmas or Easter. If we are going to make resolutions, and especially spiritual resolutions, than we should probably make use of the church calendar, if we are going to attach any significance to calendars at all. There are of course some who say we should throw the whole thing out, and rumor has it that certain branches of the Reformed faith historically have placed far more emphasis on the New Year rather than the Nativity of Christ and Crucifixion, but I am unread in these matters and perhaps lacking sufficient piety to truly care.

My second discomfort comes from what I sense to be the deeper tendency in both self-help books and many new years pledges and resolutions: a fear and loathing of self. I should note this is more a cultural critique than a criticism of the many sincere, faithful Christians who make good-faith efforts to pray more in the new year or read through the Bible, though we should always be on our guard. The aforementioned Death Cab for Cutie song “The New Year” provides an interesting study.

The initial So this is the new year is followed by a rather cynical assessement of most resolutions: And I have no resolutions / For self assigned penance / For problems with easy solutions. Gibbard seems to recognize there are problems we all would like to fix, but fails to see the connection to the new year. If you want to lose weight or change your habits go ahead and do it, no need to force yourself into a strange lenten season of mutual suffering and false promises we doubt we can truly keep.

But then again, it is the new year, So everybody put your best suit or dress on, and let’s all party because we might as well have a good time. Fair enough, we all can enjoy a party, but then why make believe that we are wealthy for just this once? Is Gibbard pointing to our silly habit of toasting with affulent champagne, when most of us are regular beer-swilling Americans? Perhaps, but the real the make-belive for most of us is that we will be someone else in the new year, perhaps someone richer, thinner, and far more dashing than we really are. This is easeir said than done, as Hawthorne reminds us. Except for divine sancifitication, we can never recast ourselves in another, more perfect mold.

Fair enough, and the prevelence of jokes about our to-be-broken resolutions affirms the general deception invovled with new year’s resolutions. But the crux of the song comes in the next verse, where Gibbard wishes the world was flat like the old days / then I could travel by just folding a map. Ah, yes, the enteral appeal to simpler times when life was easy and one didn’t have to worry about passports and currency conversions and the hassles of modern travel. Because then there’d be no distance that could hold us back.

Wait, what? Hold us back from what? Let’s assume the song is about lovers, most of them are, after all. So it’s sentimental, in a perfect year there’d be nothing between them, no time or space that could keep them from each other blah blah you’re cute I wanna hold your hand forevah mush mush my married friends say to one another.  But let’s turn it around for a minute—perhaps it isn’t distance Gibbard is trying to conquer, maybe he wants to use it to his advantage. He—we—want to run away from our old selves, old acquaintances, problems, jobs, mistakes, homes, families, loves; to get away from everything and get a fresh start without worry of anyone from the past ever finding us again. To run forever and never be held back by our own failings.

But the world isn’t flat, and we are very much stuck as Gibbard recognizes by the word “wish.” So he’s left wishing, and trying to find something to celebrate in the new year beyond the clinking of glass. Nothing seems to change in the new year, and we aren’t any different.

* Confession: Confirming the lyrics for ‘The New Year’ lead to listening through all 68 Death Cab songs in my library. Time well spent. ‘The Open Door’ EP? Fantastic. And as Tom Sawyer has recently reminded me, “Transatlanticism” is one of the best albums of the 2000s no ifs-ands-or-buts about it.