From clay to stone

Greetings and happy new year to you all. 2021 is firmly underfoot and I would hazard a guess that many of you are feeling as though there is no real relief in sight from that which ails you. At the risk of speculating wildly, this is likely due to the fact that none of us exerts quite as much control over the world as we would like to, nor is the world arranged just as we would have it. The things we enjoy seem to fly away just as we attain or indulge them, and the things that bother us have an uncompromising ability to show up at the most inconvenient times and stay longer than we would like.

And the people! You could be forgiven for lamenting that your fellow travelers on this journey lack a shared sense of decorum. Turns out there is no handy-dandy thermostat for the world. There is no dial to move or button to push one way or the other to make things more comfortable for us.

In a natural reaction to this, many of us undertake resolutions to ring in the new year, at least in part to exert a greater felt-sense of control over the few things we do control, i.e. - our reaction to what the unconscious mind vomits into our field of awareness, and our behavior writ large. In the wake of the invariable end-of-year/holiday bounty, many of us seek to tighten the proverbial belt of our desires and set about being a more resolute version of ourselves. For context, I have furnished the definition of the root word of resolution, which is:

res·o·lute /ˈrezəˌl(y)o͞ot/

adjective

1. admirably purposeful, determined, and unwavering.

That is quite a lofty rendering of what we do to ourselves at the beginning of each year. In lieu of giving you pointers on how to *achieve* this perverse goal, I wanted instead to implore you to question the process of how you set about thinking and behaving in the next few weeks, in the hopes that examining the process will improve the outcome.

By now, you have likely failed at least in part on one of these life-changing shifts you are seeking to institute on this arbitrary temporal boundary we refer to as "the new year." This is a bad thing in-and-of-itself. Luckily for you, as Chuck Klosterman reminds us, nothing exists in-and-of-itself.

If you feel as though you've failed at a resolution (perhaps because you haven't actually started), that means you have the vision of your future success firmly envisioned in your mind. On top of that, you already have the seeds of achievement sown. Here's at least a small bit of what's happening when you declare yourself a failure: 1. You've set an intention

2. You've visualized the goal

3. You've maintained an awareness of your efforts and evaluated the evidence

Francis Bacon wrote, "the contemplation of things as they are, without substitution or imposture, without error or confusion, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of intention." No matter how noble we fashion ourselves or our intentions, no one accurately perceives their own behavior and evaluates it without some degree of obscurity. We are simply too close to the subject to render an objective analysis. If you are reading this, you have the time to course correct and make good on the promises made to yourself. Don't be so quick to throw the resolutions out the window because the first few weeks of the year have not panned out as you would have had them. (Or maybe you are cruising right now and you don't feel like you have to worry about it, in which case, keep up the good work you unicorn of a human!) Either way, anything you do has to be enough as it relates to self-care and improvement. This includes setting intentions and refining one's approach to meeting them.

This is not a call to just let everything go and give up. Rather, this is a call to be wary of the subtle aggression of self-improvement, and to remain mindful of when you are shifting from clay to stone. When your thoughts about yourself and your life are turning from an open sense of possibility into the concrete rendering of judgement and evaluation, it is time to slow down and reassess from a different perspective. The river of time flows on ceaselessly without a judgement of where you are in it. Your best life is not a destination on the river at which you suddenly and irrevocably arrive; it is a process of continual and perpetual becoming. A becoming that is always happening one way or the other. Remember that it is a becoming when you have declared yourself a failure, when you say it's too late, when you haven't kept your promise to yourself so you ask, "why bother?" When you start questioning if you *really* wanted those silly things in the first place, or if you really have it in you to achieve that.

When you give yourself over to those questions and statements; that it is too late, that you don't have the juice, or that you're a failure, you are making it so. You are giving yourself permission to turn the clay of your hopes into the stone of judgement.

The question I would pose to you earnestly in those moments is do you still have the time needed to take the first step back toward the direction of your goal? You may have faltered, or have yet to start. Maybe you are not making the progress with whatever endeavor you chose to pursue. Maybe your classmate or neighbor is already doing laps around you and you're discouraged. Maybe you are just scared that you won't get where you want to.

But if you are in a place at which you can offer a judgement (about yourself or others), you are in a position to channel that judgement into a place of compassion. To suspend your egoistic interpretations of what "should" be, and allow for the process to simply be what it will be. To understand that change is hard due in large part to the fact that our brains and bodies are essentially automatons that don't necessarily concern themselves with our ephemeral and elusive happiness. Our biology is generally at odds with our health, and the work of our lives is balancing the way we've been designed and conditioned with what will ultimately make us content and secure (as much as we can be either).

In closing, I will crib the sentiment of a paperweight my partner was given years ago. It reads:

"What if I fail?"

"Oh, my darling, but what if you fly?"

As you progress through the rest of this month and year and life, take your time, be gentle with yourself when you falter, and know that when you start to have doubts, you get to doubt the doubts. Notice the judgements, take a breath, and chart the next step you need to take to move toward your best self. You can do it, and you're worth the effort.