Looking Back: On New Year Resolutions

Dr. Swaraj looks back at the new year resolutions. We welcome him back for having defeated Covid and wish him good health. An exclusive for Different Truths.

These lines of Tennyson, “Ring out the old, ring in the new”, capture the mood with which we welcome the New Year. The ringing in time happens to be resolution time also. It is the time to bury the last year’s resolutions under the weight of new ones. And finally comes the time when you realise the futility of breaking away from the past. That is the time to revisit the resolutions and to resolve not to have any more resolutions.

I did it long ago.

Once upon a time, I made many new year resolutions like others. I did it in all earnestness, though I could hardly be sure about my resolutions. Perhaps I only pretended to be serious. Or I just went with the flow to ring in the new by ringing out the old. Anyways, it didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now.

At that time, I realised that my New Year resolutions were like the oaths of a tippler. Now this Bacchus lover was a friend and a neighbour. He drank to his heart’s delight every evening without fail. But he would have his last drink of the day with these words on his lips: “It’s my last and I won’t touch the bottle again.” But my poor friend’s dream of liberation was laid to rest when he slept. He woke up the next morning with his lips aching for another drink. His last drink had a certain unrelenting timelessness about it.

I often wondered what made him forget his daily late evening resolve. Perhaps the resolve conferred certain agency on him. It made him deny that he was an alcoholic. Perhaps his resolve gave him the confidence of being in control. After all, drinking was a matter of habit and he could always give up his habit. Perhaps he enjoyed his last drink much more because he imagined it to be the last. He could sleep without any guilt after resolving that it was his last drink. That gave him a certain idea of freedom of choice. He could do it the way he liked.

But this strategy failed in stopping him from drinking. In a way, it did work, though in the reverse, as it fed his narcissism. He could enjoy his last drink while being a conscious agent of his actions. In this way he continued to be a faithful devotee of Bacchus till his last breath.     

Well, there could possibly be some other reasons also. Perhaps, the sight of his last drink came at the wrong time. By then he was inebriated enough to liken himself to the Mughal Emperor Babur. Emperor Babur, we know, had broken all his goblets one day. My friend wanted to break his goblets every next morning. But the next morning never arrived. He was an ordinary mortal and no Babur to write a poem after breaking his wine glasses. Babur, we know, wrote after breaking his goblets: “I gathered all the wine glasses, gold and silver cups, exquisitely beautiful, and destroyed them all on the spot, liberating my soul from the wine.” 

Whatever the reason, he could never give up drinking. Nor did he give up proclaiming his evening drink to be his last. Throughout his life, till he drank himself to eternal sleep, he remained resolute. He wanted to give up, but never actually did that.  

Ditto with me. He could not lay his hands off the bottle despite his three-hundred-and-sixty-five resolutions every year. I, being a much lesser mortal than him, made resolutions only once in a year. On New Year’s Eve, that’s all. But the first of January always turned out to be an ode to sloth and amnesia.

It couldn’t be any other way, given the way the first of January arrives. On New Year Eve, most TV channels recapitulate the happenings of the entire year. Obviously, they do it in a capsule form. New Year’s Eve is a glitzy affair. Celebrities are invited to ring in the new. New Year Eve parties in hotels culminate in loud music and wild dancing. Fire crackers burst to welcome the New Year.

The first day of the year comes as a rude shock after the late-night brouhaha. Having slept in the early hours of the morning, it is not easy to step out of the quilt. But you have to, it being the first day of the year. And it never is a holiday. So, you drag yourself out, willy-nilly.

The familiar rut begins anew. You start enacting the myth of Sisyphus. You realise that life is endless repetition. The familiar follows the familiar. The sun emerges from the same direction. It rises slowly, penetrating through a thick blanket of fog. First January in my part of the world is mostly a foggy day. In the evening it makes its way to the west. The stars above chart their regular course in their orbits. Some flowers smile when the sun smiles on them. Everything appears to be the same as it was in the days bygone. 

Things happen, and yet they remain the same. In a way, you can say with Estragon in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!” It may not be awful, but it is quotidian, nevertheless. Nothing changes at all.

Regarding New Year resolutions, well, I tend to go with Oscar Wilde that “good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” This realisation resulted from this consciousness also that I was no better than my tippler friend. The burden of proof lay in the huge backlog of unkept resolutions. We both could not make a new start. So much for his vows not to drink! And by implication, for my resolutions too! Hence I gave up making New Year resolutions long ago.

I had made this decision for another reason too. To escape the guilt that accompanied my unkept resolutions.

The idea of acquiring a new self through New Year resolutions is quite appealing, nonetheless. How one wishes to shed one’s old self like a snake sloughs off its skin! How one wishes to be like a caterpillar to emerge as a butterfly on the first January! How I wish I could give up my laid back approach! How I wish I could be other than what I happen to be!

Such metamorphosis, however, is the stuff of dreams. Nay, it is of mythology and animal kingdom too. Homo sapiens is made of far sterner, durable stuff. Old habits just do not die hard. In most cases they do not die at all. Deep down resides a self utterly resistant to change. Otherwise any mortal could prove the 18^th century Punjabi Sufi poet Waris Shah wrong. He wrote: “Waris Shah na aadtan jandiyan ne bhanvein kattiyee porian porian ji … Waris Shah habits don’t go, even if a person is hacked to pieces.” Well, I am too small a fry to even think of proving the great Sufi poet wrong. Moreover, the idea of getting hacked to pieces is very violent and painful. I happen to be an eternal pacifist: Jiyo aur jeene do … Live and let live. Why hack oneself to small fragments for a makeover not guaranteed even by such extreme violence?

Habits are blessings as they give us a sense of continuity.

We, after all, are creatures of habit. Habits, as Clare Carlisle argues in On Habit (2014) are a blessing as well as a curse. Habits are blessings as they give us a sense of continuity. In doing so they confer our identity upon us. Without regular habits it would be impossible to navigate our way through the chaos of life. Yes, habits can be, as Proust says In Search of Lost Time, a heavy curtain which “conceals from us almost the whole universe and prevents us from knowing ourselves” (Quoted by Carlisle in On Habit). When habits become second nature, they conceal our first nature from us.

In a way, Proust was right. A writer has to withdraw from the familiar to look at the world anew. This is how the Romantic poets tried to defamiliarise reality. But this is the job of authors and philosophers. Ordinary mortals are happy to be firmly rooted in the solid ground of habit. The predictable, robotic tyranny of habit saves us from thinking about routine jobs. If I were to think about changing gears of my car, and when and how to apply brakes, well, I’d be done for. Good, I’ve the second nature to navigate my life for me.

Hence, why drag oneself out of one’s comfort zone by making resolutions of a magical makeover? 

… the whole idea of even a radical temporal break with the past is a massive delusion.     

Incidentally, the whole idea of even a radical temporal break with the past is a massive delusion. This delusion, however, is so powerful that it is the driver of the entire consumer industry. The month of December is the time for discounts and freebies. Mega sales announced at high decibel volumes lure the gullible into the logic of a make-over. But the promised make-over proves to be a mirage. Like the promise held out by our resolutions.

Hence, I firmly resolved never to make any resolutions on the New Year eve. And this time too, the resolve not to make New Year resolutions stood.

Now whether resolving not to make a resolve is itself a resolution, this is a conundrum. Or tautology. No easy answers here. I wish someone out there reading this could enlighten me about this.  

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