Chris Bohjalian's Blog - Posts Tagged "new-year-s-resolutions"
New Year's -- the nexus of realism and hope
Over the years, I have made my share of New Year’s resolutions. I have resolved to stop biting my nails, to be more organized, and to answer all the mail I receive. The results? I still bite my nails, my library looks clean but has secret stacks of projects I haven’t dealt with or filed, and there are piles of unanswered letters cascading like the change from a slot machine from three different paper trays and desk organizers. Sometimes I view myself as hopeless. Other times? Merely human – which is, arguably, the same thing as hopeless.
But I love the human desire for betterment. I appreciate the wistfulness of the human urge to – as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote so beautifully at the very end of “The Great Gatsby” – “run faster, stretch out our arms farther.” Sure, we will never get there. Yes, as he said, we will be borne back into the past. But we keep trying.
And so it will be for millions of people this week, as once again the drive for self-improvement swamps all common sense. We will make New Year’s resolutions. Last week I asked readers to share with me some of their resolutions – the ones that, in hindsight, were doomed to fail. Here are a few of their responses.
Nancy Mutell: “Trying to use electronic media less.”
Jackie Ward: “Having recently read a magazine article on how to keep your home ‘guest ready’ in only 15 minutes a day, I was inspired. So, after retirement in December 2011, my 2012 New Year’s Eve Resolution was to do 15 minutes of housework every day in 2012. After all, how hard could this be? I’m now retired for pity sake! When getting ready for bed at the end of New Year’s Day – day one of my resolution year – my husband innocently asked, ‘What did you get done in your 15 minutes today?’ Having done absolutely nothing, my new resolution was to stop reading ridiculous magazine articles.”
Monelle Sturko: “The most ridiculous resolution I have made is to stop saying the ‘F’ word. There are times each year when no other word will do.”
Samuel Chase Armen: “To never end a sentence with a preposition. Let the grammar police know that I am not the man with whom you should mess.”
Leslie Murphy: “I was going to say something ornery about not being too hard on people who can’t follow directions. After eight years of parochial school, that’s a skill I have acquired. But every year I resolve to try and live in the moment. . .even as I imagine how I will live in the moment a day, a week, a month hence. . .”
Pam Truog: “Here’s one I make every year. ‘Never make promises I can’t keep.’”
Of course, January is all about promises we can’t keep. So is February. Come March, there will still be people smoking who had vowed to quit. The gym will be a little less crowded than it was those weeks just after the first. And I know that despite my inevitable vow to eat better, I’ll be tossing a softball-sized dollop of sour cream on a plate of nachos one Sunday night.
But how can we not celebrate the longing for excellence? The craving for betterment? The resolve to step up and buck the headswinds of human fraility? Sure, we are doomed to fail. But just imagine what horrid creatures we’d be if, at least once a year, we didn’t even try.
Happy New Year. May 2104 bring us all peace and wonder and joy.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 29, 2013. Chris’s next novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives on July 8, 2014. You can learn more about it right here on Goodreads.)
But I love the human desire for betterment. I appreciate the wistfulness of the human urge to – as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote so beautifully at the very end of “The Great Gatsby” – “run faster, stretch out our arms farther.” Sure, we will never get there. Yes, as he said, we will be borne back into the past. But we keep trying.
And so it will be for millions of people this week, as once again the drive for self-improvement swamps all common sense. We will make New Year’s resolutions. Last week I asked readers to share with me some of their resolutions – the ones that, in hindsight, were doomed to fail. Here are a few of their responses.
Nancy Mutell: “Trying to use electronic media less.”
Jackie Ward: “Having recently read a magazine article on how to keep your home ‘guest ready’ in only 15 minutes a day, I was inspired. So, after retirement in December 2011, my 2012 New Year’s Eve Resolution was to do 15 minutes of housework every day in 2012. After all, how hard could this be? I’m now retired for pity sake! When getting ready for bed at the end of New Year’s Day – day one of my resolution year – my husband innocently asked, ‘What did you get done in your 15 minutes today?’ Having done absolutely nothing, my new resolution was to stop reading ridiculous magazine articles.”
Monelle Sturko: “The most ridiculous resolution I have made is to stop saying the ‘F’ word. There are times each year when no other word will do.”
Samuel Chase Armen: “To never end a sentence with a preposition. Let the grammar police know that I am not the man with whom you should mess.”
Leslie Murphy: “I was going to say something ornery about not being too hard on people who can’t follow directions. After eight years of parochial school, that’s a skill I have acquired. But every year I resolve to try and live in the moment. . .even as I imagine how I will live in the moment a day, a week, a month hence. . .”
Pam Truog: “Here’s one I make every year. ‘Never make promises I can’t keep.’”
Of course, January is all about promises we can’t keep. So is February. Come March, there will still be people smoking who had vowed to quit. The gym will be a little less crowded than it was those weeks just after the first. And I know that despite my inevitable vow to eat better, I’ll be tossing a softball-sized dollop of sour cream on a plate of nachos one Sunday night.
But how can we not celebrate the longing for excellence? The craving for betterment? The resolve to step up and buck the headswinds of human fraility? Sure, we are doomed to fail. But just imagine what horrid creatures we’d be if, at least once a year, we didn’t even try.
Happy New Year. May 2104 bring us all peace and wonder and joy.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 29, 2013. Chris’s next novel, “Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands,” arrives on July 8, 2014. You can learn more about it right here on Goodreads.)
Our most endearing trait? Our ability to hope.
This coming Wednesday night, once again – as I do every year – I will be contemplating the irony and wistfulness in the penultimate sentence in “The Great Gatsby:”
“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .And one fine morning – ”
Fitzgerald was on to something when he combined revelry with self-delusion. Those emotions are the yin and yang of New Year’s Eve, making the holiday rather Gatsby-esque. We party hard – some of us harder than others – because the night is a tyrannical reminder that we are all another year older, but this time no one is giving us presents to cushion the blow. At the same time, we water (sometimes with champagne) that seed of optimism inside us that we will use the New Year as a reboot. It’s our second chance. Or thirty-second. Or even seventy-second. This coming year we will, somehow, get it right.
It’s rather remarkable, and says something about what is certainly among our most endearing traits as a species: Our ability to hope.
I’ve never stood in Times Square as the ball falls as midnight nears, but I’ve witnessed some pretty wonderful moments on New Year’s Eve: There is my lovely bride diving headfirst – fingernails out – across a dining room table after a spoon in the world’s best card game, Spoons. I should note she was sober. But she is athletic and competitive. She plays to win. We were at a party at friends of ours here in Lincoln.
There are the two bartenders, a man and a woman, at a restaurant in Burlington, spontaneously breaking into dance behind a redoubtable slab of burnished mahogany as midnight peels on my wife’s and my first New Year’s Eve in Vermont. The restaurant has changed hands at least twice since then, but the memory lingers. My wife and I decided the pair was in love.
And there are all of those January firsts when I was a boy and I am surveying our house after my parents’ New Year’s Eve party the night before. There is something reassuring about the debris in the kitchen sink and the living room side tables with half-filled glasses of Scotch. My parents are still asleep, but there had been people laughing into the very small hours of the morning. If I were awake at midnight, my mother would come to my bedroom and bring me downstairs so I wasn’t alone when the New Year arrived. Sure, I was surrounded by grownups, some of whom were seriously soused, but my mother understood something important about New Year’s Eve: It is a holiday about connection. Human connection.
What happens when you spend New Year’s Eve alone? Just before I started eighth grade, my family moved to Miami, Florida. I was home alone that New Year’s Eve, and I consumed a rolling pin-sized tube of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough. I didn’t bother to bake it. I ate it raw.
Let’s face it, we are all a little diminished without each other – and the world but a sad and spinning blue marble. Sartre was wrong: Hell isn’t other people. It’s their absence. What makes humankind so extraordinary is the way we find hope in one another, despite our myriad and constant failings.
And so once more this week we will wake up on the first and we will – Gatsby-like – vow to run faster. We will pledge to stretch farther.
And that’s why the night before, the last night of 2014, I will raise a glass at midnight. I will toast to my family and friends, and to better times for strangers in need. I will hope and pray that this year our annual reboot will succeed.
May 2015 bring us all peace and wonder and joy. Happy New Year.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 28, 2014. Chris's most recent novels are "The Light in the Ruins" and "Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands.")
“Tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . .And one fine morning – ”
Fitzgerald was on to something when he combined revelry with self-delusion. Those emotions are the yin and yang of New Year’s Eve, making the holiday rather Gatsby-esque. We party hard – some of us harder than others – because the night is a tyrannical reminder that we are all another year older, but this time no one is giving us presents to cushion the blow. At the same time, we water (sometimes with champagne) that seed of optimism inside us that we will use the New Year as a reboot. It’s our second chance. Or thirty-second. Or even seventy-second. This coming year we will, somehow, get it right.
It’s rather remarkable, and says something about what is certainly among our most endearing traits as a species: Our ability to hope.
I’ve never stood in Times Square as the ball falls as midnight nears, but I’ve witnessed some pretty wonderful moments on New Year’s Eve: There is my lovely bride diving headfirst – fingernails out – across a dining room table after a spoon in the world’s best card game, Spoons. I should note she was sober. But she is athletic and competitive. She plays to win. We were at a party at friends of ours here in Lincoln.
There are the two bartenders, a man and a woman, at a restaurant in Burlington, spontaneously breaking into dance behind a redoubtable slab of burnished mahogany as midnight peels on my wife’s and my first New Year’s Eve in Vermont. The restaurant has changed hands at least twice since then, but the memory lingers. My wife and I decided the pair was in love.
And there are all of those January firsts when I was a boy and I am surveying our house after my parents’ New Year’s Eve party the night before. There is something reassuring about the debris in the kitchen sink and the living room side tables with half-filled glasses of Scotch. My parents are still asleep, but there had been people laughing into the very small hours of the morning. If I were awake at midnight, my mother would come to my bedroom and bring me downstairs so I wasn’t alone when the New Year arrived. Sure, I was surrounded by grownups, some of whom were seriously soused, but my mother understood something important about New Year’s Eve: It is a holiday about connection. Human connection.
What happens when you spend New Year’s Eve alone? Just before I started eighth grade, my family moved to Miami, Florida. I was home alone that New Year’s Eve, and I consumed a rolling pin-sized tube of frozen chocolate chip cookie dough. I didn’t bother to bake it. I ate it raw.
Let’s face it, we are all a little diminished without each other – and the world but a sad and spinning blue marble. Sartre was wrong: Hell isn’t other people. It’s their absence. What makes humankind so extraordinary is the way we find hope in one another, despite our myriad and constant failings.
And so once more this week we will wake up on the first and we will – Gatsby-like – vow to run faster. We will pledge to stretch farther.
And that’s why the night before, the last night of 2014, I will raise a glass at midnight. I will toast to my family and friends, and to better times for strangers in need. I will hope and pray that this year our annual reboot will succeed.
May 2015 bring us all peace and wonder and joy. Happy New Year.
(This column appeared originally in the Burlington Free Press on December 28, 2014. Chris's most recent novels are "The Light in the Ruins" and "Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands.")
