What If It's Not a Fresh New Start?

Do you remember this final Calvin and Hobbes comic strip? The boy and his tiger pal perched on their toboggan at the top of a hill of untouched, untrodden snow. The world looks brand new, the pair say, a new year…a fresh, clean start! It’s like having a big white piece of paper to draw on! A day full of possibilities! It’s a magical world, Hobbes, ol’ buddy! Let’s go exploring!

Perhaps not all of us, but many of us prefer to think of the New Year, beginning today, in such terms. A blank slate, tabula rasa. An engagement book or google calendar with nothing entered into it yet. Indeed, when I searched for New Year's readings and poems, piece after piece, almost without exception, was a variation on the theme Lucille Clifton wrote about–leaving behind and letting go preparatory to making a fresh start. Some of my friends and perhaps some of you have started choosing a single word of focus for New Years, instead of making resolutions–so easily broken and often, though not always, about self-improvement through rigidly imposed change. But still the impulse to shake off the old in order to embrace the new is a hard habit to break.

And with good reason. We might feel there is no room for newness in our lives without jettisoning objects, habits, attitudes that no longer serve us. We might not particularly like the person we knew ourselves to be in the year just past, for one reason or another, and desire to leave that self behind in pursuit of a new, kinder, more compassionate, more direct, more motivated, more laid-back, more curious, more decisive person. Our impulse this year to speak of leaving, burning, letting go of the past might also arise out of what has transpired on the world stage in the past twelve or twenty-four or thirty-six months. Surely all of us would like a clean break from political upheaval, hatred-spewing celebrities, greed, plots, conspiracies, and, oh, yeah, COVID.

But what if 2023 isn’t a fresh, new start?

My dad subscribed to Time Magazine for decades. It was there by his chair week after week. Part of our household background. Then there came a time, in my early teens, probably, when I decided to start reading it. And I found it utterly frustrating. Every story I tried to read seemed to start in the middle. Stuff had already happened that I knew nothing about. Stuff that was vitally important to know, in order to understand the story or article I was trying to read. I remember picking up issue after issue, week after week, hoping for a brand new story–one I could get in on from the beginning. Eventually I gave up and concentrated mostly on reading the essay that in those years appeared on the final page of every issue. They were self-contained. And, incidentally, though I didn’t know it then, they taught me a lot about writing sermons.

What I learned, in my foray into reading Time, is what the Preacher wrote a couple millenia ago:

[9] What has been is what will be,

and what has been done is what will be done;

and there is nothing new under the sun.

[10] Is there a thing of which it is said,

"See, this is new"?

It has been already,

in the ages before us.

Think about one of the biggest news stories of 2022–Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. Ukrainians tell us that invasion is simply a continuation of the invasion that began eight years earlier in February 2014. Our Christmas Eve scripture readings were full of references to as it was foretold by the prophet–that story too had started before it started. And whatever fresh start we might imagine or hope or plan for in the year now beginning–that started long before today, too. New jobs. New homes. New relationships. Same with them, too. They all started long before the first day; their beginnings buried in all our lived experiences up to that moment.

We might imagine or wish or pretend that we can leave behind disappointments, failures, tired routines, outgrown ways of engaging in life. But, according to a truism that’s been around in one formulation or another at least since the writings of Thomas à Kempis in the 15th century: wherever you go, there you are.

Some rare people might succeed in making a near totally fresh start–high level criminals, perhaps, who can afford plastic surgery and assumed identities and to abandon jobs, property, history. And participants in the witness protection program. The rest of us have to list former residences and landlords and previous names on rental applications. We have to list job histories and past employers on resumes or loan applications. We have to send previous transcripts to new schools. Our social media footprint never fades away. Our friends and family and enemies never forget. But these things are petty hurdles in the quest for a fresh start. The real obstacles lie within.

I don’t mean to suggest that we can never change. We exist in a state of continuous change. And some of that change is considered and deliberate. We can eliminate bad habits, develop new healthier, more productive, or community-minded ones. We can learn new things. Change our opinions. But all that we’ve ever done, experienced, felt became a part of us, shaped the person we are now in irrevocable ways.

We can vow to let go of what we said to ourselves about ourselves when we were sixteen and twentysix and thirtysix. We can burn symbols of regrets. We can sever ties with people whose presence in our lives harms us. We can fill our schedules and our intentions with as much newness and freshness as we can manage–clothes, food, music and literary selections, exercise routines, friends. We can move to a new city or country. Take a new job. Start a new relationship. And all that newness will have grown in some measure directly or indirectly out of who we were and what we did and saw and experienced and understood in 2022 or 2010 or 1967.

The painful, challenging, traumic, disappointing things hardened us or made us fragile, and maybe taught us our own strength and made us a bit more discerning and wise, and maybe bitter or overly cautious but maybe more compassionate and better able to face risk and uncertainty. And the good things deepened our trust in the universe and increased our capacity for joy and wonder and bold engagement with our world. And all of it, the welcome and the unwelcome influence what it is we seek to leave behind at year’s end and what it is we seek to pursue at year’s beginning. We bring our old layered, patched, reinforced, broken and repaired selves into that field of untouched snow, onto the big white sheet of paper, into that fresh new year.

Out there in the world the stories that will be tomorrow’s headlines have their beginning lost in years gone by, and if we want to understand we have to muddle through like a teenager trying to read Time Magazine, or turn to historians and documentaries and all of the internet for help, if we can separate the reputable sources for the misinformation.

In here, in our hearts, ah, in our hearts we can give thanks that it’s not a fresh new start, along with the poet John O’Donohue who wrote:

At The End Of The Year

As this year draws to its end,

We give thanks for the gifts it brought

And how they became inlaid within

Where neither time nor tide can touch them.

The days when the veil lifted

And the soul could see delight;

When a quiver caressed the heart

In the sheer exuberance of being here.

Surprises that came awake

In forgotten corners of old fields

Where expectation seemed to have quenched.

The slow, brooding times

When all was awkward

And the wave in the mind

Pierced every sore with salt.

The darkened days that stopped

The confidence of the dawn.

Days when beloved faces shone brighter

With light from beyond themselves;

And from the granite of some secret sorrow

A stream of buried tears loosened.

We bless this year for all we learned,

For all we loved and lost

And for the quiet way it brought us

Nearer to our invisible destination.

Amen.

(lmd)