Here is my New Year’s statistical observation: My interest in celebrating the new year and my birthday have declined with age. My interest in birthdays peaked at about 11. Interest in celebrating New Year’s Eve at about 20. Since then, my expectations of either have mellowed considerably.
There is still a residue of hope in either. I like to be remembered on my birthday, and on New Year’s, I still hope for a good year. But these days being remembered at all is just fine, and any day filled with hope is a plus. Counting personal or global years? Not so important.
What I hope for in the new year turns out to be more or less what I hope for all the time: some sense of contentment. Contentment is like the serenity prayer’s call “to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” The prayer is about God granting these abilities. Contentment is about a life lived with these abilities. So in some ways, what I want for the new year is what I want for Christmas, my birthday and the odd Tuesday morning when I really need it. What I want is the contentment that comes from exercising these abilities to accept, have courage, change and do so wisely. My hope is to practice the art of living this way with some grace.
There will be plenty of opportunities to work for change. There will be lots of times when that work was not enough, or the problems were too great or beyond our reach. There will also be times when we can make a difference and must. And yes, it will require both our will and our wisdom to live into these opportunities. There is plenty of chaos to go around, and we mostly get to do small things to make the chaos manageable.
New Year’s resolutions are a kind of way of setting an agenda for the near future. But things change so quickly these days that I wonder if our agendas might better be set for each day in its turn. “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof.” Most of the changes we can make concern the moment, the now, the present.
So rather than New Year’s resolutions or thinking ahead to our personal goals next year, I suggest we rise each morning, greeting the new day with the resolve to live so that we have the courage to change what can be changed so that a better life can be lived for all of us.
Perhaps we will come to a place of true contentment: where we know that we have done the best we can, hopefully with a wisdom that stretches us to give all that we have to support justice and mercy in this world, where both are often so lacking.
May each of us, this day and every day, be a blessing to the world and find contentment in that.
Mark Harris is an Episcopal priest living in Lewes. An artist/printmaker and poet, he writes on social and religious issues and is a social and political activist.
