Of Resolutions
Jan. 1st, 2011 02:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexandraerinY'know, I made a Facebook status post a little bit ago that said "My resolutions for the new year are 1680x1050 and 1024 x 600." This was prompted by seeing a post a friend made elsewhere about not liking resolutions, in general... but now I'm thinking.
My post played on two different uses of the word "resolution". Only once a year is it really used by individual people in the sense of a plan of action. Normally it's committees and councils that "issue resolutions". When we talk about a resolution and we're not talking about display screens, we're more likely to be talking about endings... not our resolve to do something, but how something has ultimately been resolved.
By and large we're a race of actors in the moment and thinkers after the fact. We respond to things as they come upon us, we pick the hills on which we want to die and then we spend our lives constructing justifications and defenses for these stances, trying to convince ourselves as well as others that we're not just reacting. We use terms like "sunk cost fallacy" and "cognitive dissonance" and "confirmation bias" to explain this behavior, which we're far more likely to recognize in others than in ourselves.
A man named Robert Burns composed the poem that gives us the words to "Auld Lang Syne". He wrote another poem, whose most famous lines runs thusly: the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.
For English audiences, the key lines are often quoted as "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray." And so it is with our plans and our resolutions. A plan of any scope and ambition worth speaking of is nothing more than an itemized series of hopes, our hope that the circumstances we're counting on will come to pass and that the we'll have the strength to follow through when the moment is upon us. Hope is a fragile thing. We are fragile things. Reality is hard and harsh and cruel.
In the end, so many things resolve themselves, and we try to explain to ourselves and each other how they happened. Sometimes we don't even pick the hills we die on... we just get pinned down somewhere.
And yet we never stop hoping. We never stop planning. No amount of dashed dreams or foiled plans is sufficient for us to learn the lesson. When I consider this, I can't help being reminded of something... something that happened just ten days ago. Remember it? The longest, darkest night of the year... the complete and total disappearance of the full moon. The depths of winter should be the season of despair, but it's a season of hope, spanning the solstice, Christmas and all similar mid-winter festivals, and the solar new year.
It gets dark. It gets cold. Our hopes and dreams come to naught.
Life goes on.
And it gets brighter. The air grows warmer. We make new plans. We pick ourselves up.
We go on.
2010 was not a great year for me when it comes to plans coming together, but it was definitely a year of resolutions. There are things that were resolved, ultimately for the better. Because of it, I'm starting 2011 in a somewhat better position when it comes to making and keeping plans.
Ultimately, the only resolution we can be sure of keeping for the new year is... the old year. It's over. It's done. Resolved.
Happy 2011, everybody. May the worst of it beat the best of the year that's passed.
My post played on two different uses of the word "resolution". Only once a year is it really used by individual people in the sense of a plan of action. Normally it's committees and councils that "issue resolutions". When we talk about a resolution and we're not talking about display screens, we're more likely to be talking about endings... not our resolve to do something, but how something has ultimately been resolved.
By and large we're a race of actors in the moment and thinkers after the fact. We respond to things as they come upon us, we pick the hills on which we want to die and then we spend our lives constructing justifications and defenses for these stances, trying to convince ourselves as well as others that we're not just reacting. We use terms like "sunk cost fallacy" and "cognitive dissonance" and "confirmation bias" to explain this behavior, which we're far more likely to recognize in others than in ourselves.
A man named Robert Burns composed the poem that gives us the words to "Auld Lang Syne". He wrote another poem, whose most famous lines runs thusly: the best-laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.
For English audiences, the key lines are often quoted as "The best-laid plans of mice and men often go astray." And so it is with our plans and our resolutions. A plan of any scope and ambition worth speaking of is nothing more than an itemized series of hopes, our hope that the circumstances we're counting on will come to pass and that the we'll have the strength to follow through when the moment is upon us. Hope is a fragile thing. We are fragile things. Reality is hard and harsh and cruel.
In the end, so many things resolve themselves, and we try to explain to ourselves and each other how they happened. Sometimes we don't even pick the hills we die on... we just get pinned down somewhere.
And yet we never stop hoping. We never stop planning. No amount of dashed dreams or foiled plans is sufficient for us to learn the lesson. When I consider this, I can't help being reminded of something... something that happened just ten days ago. Remember it? The longest, darkest night of the year... the complete and total disappearance of the full moon. The depths of winter should be the season of despair, but it's a season of hope, spanning the solstice, Christmas and all similar mid-winter festivals, and the solar new year.
It gets dark. It gets cold. Our hopes and dreams come to naught.
Life goes on.
And it gets brighter. The air grows warmer. We make new plans. We pick ourselves up.
We go on.
2010 was not a great year for me when it comes to plans coming together, but it was definitely a year of resolutions. There are things that were resolved, ultimately for the better. Because of it, I'm starting 2011 in a somewhat better position when it comes to making and keeping plans.
Ultimately, the only resolution we can be sure of keeping for the new year is... the old year. It's over. It's done. Resolved.
Happy 2011, everybody. May the worst of it beat the best of the year that's passed.
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on 2011-01-01 09:50 am (UTC)no subject
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