Leave Your Livestock Alone

[Writer's note: I started this shortly after the New Year and am now returning to it shortly before the end of January... The New Year is assuming a brisk pace!]

There were some unfamiliar faces that I saw while on my run today.  I could probably explain many of those unfamiliar faces on account of the fact I was running during the day (I typically only run during the morning).  But I suspect that many of those new faces were people recently-resolved to start running (or to run more) this New Year.

The New Year is an interesting time.  The run afforded some time for me think about this time of year, a time when many people take stock of their lives and resolve to change something about them.

There are the traditional, possibly cliche resolutions:
- I'll eat / drink less
- I'll go to the gym more
- I'll find a new job
- I'll finally do something about that part of my life that seems to irk me so

Part of me thinks we are so prone to imagine a change around this time of year due to the odd month that is the American December, full of holidays, gluttony, strange weather and other stimuli.  Who really looks forward to the start of January?  Maybe we all enter the New Year with both an existential hangover as well as a real hangover.

But I think there is something deeper amidst this (my observation) rampant ennui.

The urge to change is something I have struggled with many times (and continually, even unto this day) over the years.  In my humble observation, there are several main-line vehicles typically used.  The most common ones:


1) You can go back to school
This is a good one--particularly for the mid- to late-20 something.  You're on your own, trying to chart your course, and you just feel like you could do better.  So you go back to school and get a professional or graduate degree.  The catch is that you should really have a strong sense of what it is that you actually want to do (other than just "to make more money").  This expensive ploy can pay great dividends or saddle you with debt (inducing a panic, typically causing you to take a job that you don't love so that you can pay off those school loans).


2) You can try and escape
Who hasn't read a great story of travel--and escape.  I'm thinking about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Eat, Pray, Love or In Patagonia (though Chatwin was really a travel correspondent; still, he pretty effectively got the hell out of wherever he started, didn't he?).  During those tech go-go years of the 1990s, I remember many a story about people who--fed up with their lucrative tech jobs--sold the farm and bought a round-the-world ticket.  There's something to dropping everything and putting yourself out on the road.  My experiences studying and living in Denmark and Poland certainly comprise some of the most formative years in my social development.  But something I eventually realized (after my third or so escape plan ended) was that you almost always have to return to some aspect of the life that you began prior to your journey.  You can recast yourself in a new place, but until you've made peace with that whom you are "at home" you are never really going to escape anything.  If by traveling / adventure / immersion in an experience you can come to peace with yourself, that's another thing.  But many fail to do that; instead, they spend a great deal of money--albeit seeing some cool stuff--only to return to the same issues from which they fled.


3) You can try and throw money at the situation
Well, see numbers 1 and 2 above for ways to try and throw money at change.  Apart from throwing money at more school or at travel, I've seen many people throw money at material objects to distract them from immediate challenges or at food / drink.  This one can leave you feeling particularly hallow--a wraith of the (now, because you are in consumer debt) self-perpetuating, negative feedback loop that you created.


4) You can try and throw relationships / sex at the situation
I always slightly cringe when I hear Coldplay's song, Fix You (off of their X&Y album).  It's a nice sentiment but a terrible idea. Why?  Because after many a good and bad relationship, I've come to the conclusion that you can't fix someone--and they can't fix you.  You don't go into a relationship (hoping for a healthy relationship, that is) with the intention of improving yourself (or another).  All that relationship becomes is some object for a new obsession: fixing someone.  That's a job, not a relationship.  The (hopefully) healthy sex life that relationships bring will distract you, but eventually you will want for for the emotional connection that the relationship will forever lack because it is a relationship built on a connection between two people who don't know themselves well enough to--or who just don't want to-- share the good and the bad things about their real selves.

Relationships are actually a great segue to talking about what I think is at the heart of all this New Year change and self-improvement.  I think it all comes down to confidence.  Most importantly, the confidence about which I write is the confidence one feels from believing that--regardless of what is going on around you--at least you know yourself.

Dating is a great test of confidence, because it is fundamentally what you date.  I think you essentially date the the confidence that another projects (or fails to project) that they have confidence about who he / she is.  I understand the impulse with number 4 above: many people are trying to fill the void they feel inside themselves where some sense of self or purpose should be.  But I am highly skeptical that you can find it through a relationship (well, maybe if it is a really bad relationship that causes you to bring into focus the things in which you know you believe (in visible contrast to that of your partner).. this is called a [very] "mixed blessing").

So those are some of my broodings on resolutions in the New Year, change, and whatnot.  In summary, I think the New Year can bring equal parts crises in confidence and inspiration to aspire to something greater than what we currently are.  Maybe that's existence: a tension between acceptance of what we perceive as our reality and confidence in it.

I like a quote from the movie Gross Point Blank on this subject (though the context is about going to a high school reunion and not surviving transition to a New Year):


Hey, I know everybody's coming back to take stock of their lives. You know what I say? Leave your livestock alone.

And one more from a t-shirt I saw a while ago while running (on the subject of adopting physical fitness as a New Year resolution):

"Be well; stay fit; die anyway"