New Years Resolutions: How to Change When Things Remain the Same

The philosopher Fredrick Nietzsche once asked his readers to imagine that their lives would repeat over and over again across the ever expanding arrow of eternity (the myth of Eternal Return). Then he posed the question concerning whether this notion was something we could accept and affirm, or whether the very thought of it caused us to recoil and crumble.

In many ways Freud showed how this myth plays out in our everyday existence by exposing how we actually do repeat some basic part of our life over and over again (expressed in the Fundamental Fantasy). Something that is manifested in our relationships, dreams, fantasies and interactions with others. The faces might change and the context might be different but he showed how the same scenarios from our past tend to play out in different forms throughout our present. As the analyst Adam Philips once wrote, the challenge we have is making the past history (i.e. the most significant parts of our past tend to remains with us, stuck like a limpet to the present).

Perhaps then, as we stand at the threshold of 2012, we should avoid making resolutions about undergoing some fundamental change and rather admit that we are likely to repeat many of the same situations we have before. But rather than giving up the possibility of change entirely we can do something. We can resolve to try and repeat the situations we keep creating in a different way. Reacting to the dilemmas we relive in a novel manner; one that opens up new, more liberating and enlivening possibilities.

Thanks for being on this journey with me.

Happy New Year