EVERYMAN’s BIRTHDAY

In the year 1821 Charles Lamb-aka Elia- wrote an essay for the January edition of the London Magazine in which he asserted that , “New Year’s Day is everyman’s birthday.” As I partied with the 92128 gang on New Year’s Eve, I got stuck on the idea of the new year’s resolution… its history and meaning.

Apparently the Babylonians of some 4,000 years ago provide the first record of resolutions and they basically were contracts with the gods. The “resolutions” of the time were essentially contractual relationships that promised a big payoff if certain conditions were met i.e If plant my field in soy and donate 20% of my crop to the poor you will increase the fertility of my entire farm. These transactional resolutions have morphed into a modern exercise in goal setting.

Today, our resolutions are often more personal based on a more of this/ less of that dynamic. We wish to be more patient, more understanding, more aware. We want less strife, illness and fear. We feel as Emerson said that “the only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be.” We want to progress and we have hopes for better days and better behaviors. Lamb also said that, “No one ever regarded the First of January with indifference.” How right he was.

It is telling that the Romans had a festival for Janus the god of beginnings and endings, a god that has two faces one gazing into the past the other to the future. January is named for this two-faced god and it is our time to weigh, assess and to dream of better days. Ironically resolution setting in itself has two potential interpretations…one hopeful and the other disappointing. If our happiness is directly related to our expectations, are we not creating a mechanism for failure. If you resolve to lose 30 pounds and you only lose 15, have you failed? In an effort to paint the most flattering portrait of yourself have you ruined the canvas?

Avoiding the pitfalls of guilt and disappointment that are inherent in all goal setting, is not the point of the resolution exercise. New Years day is everyman’s birthday, full of possibility and potential wonders. Everything is new. We are new.

The poet Rilke tells us to, “welcome the new year…full of things that have never been before.” We do not want to question if things that have never been before can possibly exist at all, we want to bask in the goal of potential. You can lose the beer belly, stop cursing the bad driver and balance your checkbook and you should resolve to do so. You can thrive.

Happy Birthday !!