Resolutions and Revolutions

Why do our New Year's vows, so heartily and seriously resolved, end in defeat? And why did we more than half expect them to? Perhaps the second question is the answer to the first: defeatist self-fulfilling prophecy. But I suspect there is another reason, namely the cyclical nature of the calendar year. We know we will end where we started. What first seems a brand new beginning will wind up running out of gas and slowing to a halt, trailing off to silence. And then we will renew our vows again. But we will not get anywhere with them then, either. Because the whole thing is the eternal return.

If our earth really became unchained from the sun, as Nietzsche once posed, it would mean we no longer had any central focus to orbit. This was a metaphor for the lack of a central objective truth upon which to base normative moral or religious thinking. It was a parable of the glad knowledge of Nihilism: not the denial of meaning so much as the free creation of meaning. I for one am happy to affirm that slipping of the solar apron strings!

But what, then, of cyclicality? What of the round of repeating seasons? Imagine the earth like the moon on the seventies Sci-Fi program Space 1999, having escaped its geocentric orbit and drifting out through and beyond the Solar System. The inhabitants were still able to count hours and days and weeks and months and years, but these quantifications had assumed the character of artifice. They no longer recorded arrival at a scheduled juncture, at an accustomed niche in the year or tick on the clock. One might, stranded in space for a long time, look back on experiences a year before, but it would be an illusion. The present moment would no longer correspond to an earlier counterpart in the orbit of the sun. Time would have switched from cyclical to linear. History would be like sentences that lack punctuation or even syntactical sense. We would be advancing into raw existence, unprecedented and without meaning-lending reference to anything that had gone before, motion into a future completely open and therefore unknown, no landmarks or pointing signs informing us that we have been this way before, because we will not have.

In such a framework of free fall, soaring flight into an empty void, one might make resolutions that one might keep, because no cycling calendar would insist on bringing us back to square one to start the identical dance again.

But as it is, Siva dances his infinitely complex choreography, with the Universe as his partner, until they both tire and decide to sit the next one out. And then the Manvantara, the Great Night, settles over the cosmos—until it starts again. And that is what it does: it starts to repeat itself, and so do you. You will resume the circle dance and get precisely nowhere.

But maybe there's a lesson there. Maybe you are disappointed because there is no way off the merry go round, and you mistaken think there should be. But if there were, that would be the end of the ride. The merry-go-round is a passing parade of fantasies and fantastic sights. There is nothing to see once the ride stops, unless you want to start it again. And we do. You are not trying to reach a destination when you pay for your ticket and hop aboard the ride, are you? The merry-go-round is not a train. You are only there for the ride. I suspect life is like that. And I'm enjoying the ride. I'm in no hurry to get off.

Part of that ride is making New Year's resolutions, and part of it is realizing you haven't kept them. What of it? It's the ride that counts.

So says Zarathustra.