The Great Inspirer - A Clean Slate

It is until this morning that I realise that of all the people I chatted to last night, and all the gradually more inebriated conversations, not one person had asked whether I was making any New Year’s Resolutions, and, if so, what they were. It’s almost mandatory for a New Year’s Eve party, normally. Even more unusually, given my tendency to enjoy making plans and self improvement schemes, I have not actually given any thought to it myself. Normally I have tens of resolutions, whole notebooks of them in some years, and enjoy nothing better than listing them, tracking my progress against them, plotting charts and making folders in support of them, and then analysing endlessly the potential reasons why I haven’t managed to keep them. Yes, I really am that sad.

The whys are wherefores of not having done it this year, however, though undoubtedly fascinating, are not my point in this entry. I am, believe it or not, rather tired of the sight of my own navel, and would instead, like to think about the appeal of New Year’s Resolutions more generally.

Personally, and I suspect plenty of others feel the same, it is the idea of a clean slate that is so compelling at this time of year. Somehow, the fact that you are making plans for something different, voids and invalidates the previous transgressions.

‘Because I am deciding now’, you might say, as a rather obtuse example, ‘that I will no longer eat cat food, somehow negates, and wipes away the fifty previous years in which I have existed on a diet solely consisting of cat food.’

It doesn’t make sense, of course, but it’s endemic in human nature. The most important thing is the fact that we changed it. The year that will go on record is the one in which we did not, even for one meal on one day, eat cat food. All previous years have been wiped out. It is as if they never happened.

I think it’s rather beautiful, the human capacity to believe in redemption. It is a hopeful, a positive outlook, focusing on the future, forgiving ourselves and others for what they have done previously. There is an understanding at the heart of it, a rare insight and acceptance of the patterns of ourselves.  There is nothing more debilitating than dragging around past guilt like a millstone. Or, if you want to get really literary, an albatross. Moreover, it is almost impossible to begin anew if you really look coldly at your new beginning, and perceive it for what it is, an as yet unproven, tiny micro droplet in the ocean of our various iniquities. There is infinitely more empirical proof for our capacity to eat cat food, than for our capacity not to. In the pie chart of our lives, not eating cat food occupies such a tiny slice as to be almost imperceptible. Our identity is almost entirely made up of our Felix feasting persona. Think like that and you may as well give it up now.

So we wipe clean our slates. And there is something so hopeful about the future. Something that seems so very likely about our ability to change.

Remember the feeling of getting a new exercise book in school? Every time a nice clean new book was brought out, you would treat it so carefully, handle it so reverently, and you would promise yourself that in this exercise book, unlike all the others, only your very best handwriting would feature. Only your most perfect mathematical workings. There would be no mistakes in this book, not like all the others. No ‘see me’. No crosses. No scribblings out. Indeed, the passion for removing all evidence of past transgressions in our urge for achieving an unblotted record, a clean and angelic new slate, would stretch so far as to, especially in the case of the very early pages of the new exercise book, once a tiny error had been made, or a not so perfectly formed letter, tear out the offending page to preserve the new exercise book’s special integrity.

Oh yes, we are hopeful beings, striving for better. Even if it is at the expense of the environment. We had an English teacher whose first activity at the start of each term, would be to make us go through and number all the pages in our new books, purely to prevent such ruses in the pursuit of perfection. He was a good teacher. And it certainly, environmentally and economically, made sense.  But I wonder if he had somehow missed the point. It’s great, isn’t it, that we are so willing to strive against our inevitable fallibility, and to employ the necessary suspension of disbelief, the relevant self deception to enable us to do so?

I have long believed in the power of the clean slate. How many times have we put on a new spurt following a change of boss, or of jobs? How much more powerful is it when considering doing something not to the best of our ability, to be told how wonderfully we always perform, than to be told we had better get on and buck our ideas up? Those who know they are not believed in, have nothing to aspire to. They are locked in a place in which they are denied sight of that so very important clean slate. Continually pass someone’s negative record back on to them and they will, miserably, continue to add to it. Put them in a situation where nobody knows anything about them, or tell them you believe they are, already, that positive thing you want them to aim for, and you have vastly more chance of allowing them a clear pathway towards making it happen.

   

Put all that together, and I am greatly in support of New Year’s Resolutions. My only question is, why are we so hard on ourselves still? Given all that positive energy, why do we insist it has to be kept up for a whole year? These drastic changes, often complete denial of chocolate, of alcohol, or strictly adhered to practice of some exercise, or some new skill, are going to take severe dedication, more than most people naturally have, to stick to for 365 days of a year. Think about it, in that year there are going to be a myriad of different celebrations, of different states of being, of moods, of situations, even of seasons. Is it reasonable to expect ourselves to continue in our new perfectionist policies for such an unpredictable length of time? We undo our rather more hopeful, kinder tendencies, by failing to acknowledge how long, both in time and experience, a year is.

Why not try for New Month’s resolutions? For new week or even new day’s resolutions? I am not talking about allowing ourselves perfect absolution and the ability to simply shrug off each day and, ultimately, never achieve what we aimed at. I am talking about avoiding the terrible pit falls of perceived failure. How many women’s diets fail because they neglect them one day and then think, ‘well that’s it then, I’ve ruined it now, I may as well feel miserable and console myself with a kit kat.’ Hung for a dog as well as a lamb, I think, the old adage goes. How much more successful over a more lengthy basis would we be if we simply started again the next month, the next week, or even in extremes, the next day? Overall how many more days of the year would we not eat cat food if we remade that resolution monthly, than if we had to wait until next year to try again, telling ourselves this year, we had failed?

And what if school exercise books were slimmer, cutting down the time period in which we might  see the inevitable decline? Would children do better if, every fortnight, they were issued with a new book, would the total number of carefully done sums, attentive handwriting and essays aiming for a higher mark than before, increase over the same time period?

Given that no one is going to take me up on this, I can safely hypothosise that they would. And actually, I really believe I might be right here.

That human capacity to embrace redemption – let’s  use it.

P.S. That was just an example. I don’t really eat cat food.

P.P.S Well not since last month, anyway.