 KUNAL TEJ BIR LAMA |
This may be the umpteenth plus one time you have read something about new year resolutions, just this year. But we all know how difficult it is to be resolved enough to do what we gotta do. Giving up vices, inculcating virtues, getting things done for number one. So much so that we are equally habituated to making fun of what's not done, even before the year gets underway.
But what say the ghosts of years past? How often do we actually stop to consider, at the turning of the year, not just which of the start-of-year resolutions we succeeded or failed at, but just what we have accomplished for ourselves? How has work, love, and life been? We're not simply looking at trajectories to the top and bottom lines, a perverse log applied to your own frame. Was it a good year? All said and done, do you feel better?
The novelist EM Forster was known to keep written account of what he had achieved at the end of the year past. It may be ironic that his diaries reveal how his homosexuality prevented him from writing (about middle-class themes) from 1924 to his death in 1970. But the principle stands. Who accounts for you?
Oftentimes it seems looking back is a luxury only the very old have, because (we think) they have so little to look forward to in comparison, and in any case they have not very much to be doing. If you think about it, reminiscing of what was and what might have been is indeed a luxury. But if one life is all you get (or at any rate all you remember), why not review it from time to time? It's something we can do collectively, too, and not just to lament where we have stumbled.