NEW YEAR, NEW SALADS, NEW LIFE?
Sure, why not? 🍾 🎊 🎉 🥗
IT’S COMPLETELY DELUDED to believe that simply because a fictional character known as Father Time has torn the final page from the old calendar and cracked open the first page of the new one that everyone—people who have been perfect, people who have been the worst, and everyone in between—is entitled to a new beginning, a clean slate, a brighter future, a new attitude.
Happy New Year! Now your life can really begin!
Never mind that the calendar itself is a cultural construct that has evolved and changed over “time” (whatever that is) since the Paleolithic period, at least, with 40 different calendars in use today, according to the Royal Museums Greenwich.
In whatever culture you want to call this (waves arms around while rolling eyes and shaking head), January 1st appears to be the only day of the year when we all agree to believe in second chances for everyone! And under this spell of mass magical thinking, we tell ourselves that the previous year is truly in the past—as if a partition had come clanging down and hermetically sealed off the old year from the new, preventing any previously committed messiness from seeping into our pristine, shiny futures.
After going all year not deciding that we’ll finally begin saving more money, being kinder to our elderly relatives, giving money to charity, toning our arms, learning to play pickleball or do macrame, planning our divorces, drinking less (or more), spending more time in nature, etcetera, we tell ourselves that, sure, the dead of winter is when we’ll finally pull off dreams we claimed to have no time or energy for last spring, when all the flowers were blooming and butterflies were practically landing right on our heads. None of it makes a bit of sense.
But as lame as New Year’s resolutions sound when you parse them to death this way, I absolutely positively love the idea of them! My feeling is that—unlike the animals in the forests, fields, and seas, or even the ones we trap in our zoos—we as a species are lucky to have the ability to play such daffy, superstitious tricks on ourselves—tricks that inspire us to continue blindly taking the next few steps into the unlit future.
We have the ability to hope.