The year that was and will be

What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others – Pericles, (l. 495–429 BCE) was a prominent Greek statesman, orator, and general during the Golden Age of Athens.

New Year’s resolutions are penny-ante prayers. You are this way, but you hope to be that way. You used to want this, but now you want that.

The assumption behind resolutions is that something must be corrected and improved. One vows to be better than one was the year before.

Part of the nature of resolutions, particularly for those north of 60, has to do not only with the New Year before us, but also with time already spent, or misspent.

Generally, we reflect on the years we’ve lived, on the past resolutions made and broken. Another New Year’s Eve has come and gone. Every time the clock strikes, the heart sinks. You are running out of time, and time is what we value most.

Thanks to Isaac Newton’s calculus (and you should know that Dec 25 was his 381st birthday!)I found that the clock, not the steam engine, was the principal machine of the industrial age because time has a commanding relationship to the expenditure of human energy, and thus to any product itself. From the start, the essence of industry has been that things run on time. Time touches everything in life, even love. The fundamental things apply.

Thus there is always a melancholic desperation and urgency when we shout, “Happy New Year!” Will this New Year be any better than the last? We resolve that it will. We resolve to be fitter, healthier, cleverer, richer, more successful, more popular, more productive, better dressed, and happier. And so restarts the whole vain, foolish, inevitably disappointing cycle.

The trouble with all such self-oriented promises is that they deal in chicken feed. What does the great wide world care about if you lose weight, work out, or work harder, or quit drinking or smoking?

Quit smoking or smoke three packs a day. Work out daily or let yourself go. It’s your choice, your life, your body. Meanwhile, the world — the whole tortured, self-destructive, polarised, endangered, extraordinary world — spins on.

What if, instead of planning our exercise regimens, we focused our intentions on all that is undesirable in human activity — wars, bigotry, brutality, the despoiling of the earth — and sought to address it? What if instead of making a milquetoast resolution, we made airtight commitments?

In ‘Leaves of Grass’, American poet Walt Whitman writes: “This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy … re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem.”

So, there! If you’re looking for a worthwhile resolution, Whitman is not a bad place to start.

The task of improving the world may seem impossible, but it isn’t. All it takes is the proper sequence of correct discrete decisions. Decisions are just resolutions with teeth.

My wife told me a story from her childhood on her grandparents’ farm in Kampung Mayang Mawang, Serian. The little girl, looking out over acres and acres of corn, asked her grandfather, “How are we going to shuck all that corn?” Her grandfather said, “One row at a time.”

This, too, is how to improve the world. And we can start small.
Personally, I vow that I will frequently visit a hospital and try to distract ‘him’ with stories, the funnier the better. I vow that I will phone my wife whenever I find myself with free time— and there are plenty — at least twice a week just to chat and make her feel part of the living world. I vow to give alms to our badly off relatives who ask, and to those who don’t, and to stand up for the stupid and crazy, the stupider and crazier the better. I promise to keep an eye out for strays (cats, dogs and people) and bring them safety and comfort. I vow to see every wrong as a menace, every wound an opportunity.

What will you do — right now, this week, this month — to make a better world? Stage a protest. Send a letter to right a wrong, or to proffer friendship. A thoughtful, sympathetic message to a friend in sorrow or distress is a powerful thing. Lend a hand. Offer a word of comfort or inspiration or support or love. Donate money or, most valuable of all, time. There are so many ways to move this world, right within reach.

The great beautiful irony of all this, of course, is that selflessness is not the opposite of self-improvement. Selflessness is self-improvement — the most meaningful and lasting kind.

Practice it, and you may just find that the New Year is, in fact, a step up from the last. You may find that all at once, you look and feel better than you would have after any amount of dieting or exercise. You’d be unburdened by ego, and lighter on your feet. Say! Haven’t you lost weight?

Practice it, and suddenly you will find that your little life has gotten big. Big life, grand life is like art. It is not done well unless the artist dreams expansively, ridiculously, by making a glorious Whitman-size fool of her in seeking to enhance everything and cure every ill, nothing less.

At a dinner event a couple of months ago, some doctors asked me why I wrote something the way I did, and I found myself blurting out, “To save the world.” It was laughable, preposterous and true.

DISCLAIMER:

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.