New Year, Old Me...con't

Dang it, I already missed a post yesterday! That's why I didn't want to make updating my blog daily my New Year's resolution. So I haven't broken it yet!

We are having a couple over tonight, a childhood friend of Brian's and his wife. In anticipation of our evening, and after speaking with my mother today on the phone, and taking a really long walk around our neighborhood, I began to think about what New Year's Eve used to mean to me.

I still have the journal I kept in middle and high school. I used to make a list on New Year's Eve of everything of note that I accomplished the past year, and I made another list detailing all of my hopes and dreams. The past ten years or so, the idea of these lists makes me want to have some wine with that cheese. It's just so...cliched. It's not weird to look forward to a clean slate, but the thing is that a new year is never a clean slate.

In The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan engages in a discussion about animal ethics that I found interesting if not slightly out of my intellectual range for Christmas break reading. He presented various arguments about the ethics of eating meat, and I had never really considered the fact that slaughtering animals is ethical because they do not have the capacity to anticipate death and to understand what death really means (not that humans understand much about death either, but at least we know it will happen and that afterward we never have interactions with a person again, at least not on this Earth). Thus, this inability limits the likelihood of suffering, if you take suffering to include the anticipation of pain and loss and the ability to ruminate upon your own sense of mortality, which supposedly animals cannot.

Okay, what does this have to do with New Year's? I had to think for a second to remember why I started this post to begin with...all right, I think it had something to do with suffering. I never used to understand why people wished each other good health and prayed for continued health and peace. I grew up in an idyllic childhood setting which seriously could not have been better. I managed to screw up sometimes anyway, like any good American teenager, but nonetheless, it was seemingly perfect by all accounts. It served as a sort of anesthesia, though, making me numb to how others might suffer in this world.

I think health and peace are what we should primarily wish everyone. Feeling peace in spite of anxieties, and being thankful when our bodies function well. We cannot always control our bodies, and we cannot always control what happens to us in our lives. But being at peace means that we accept what happens one day at a time and realize that we have this Earth, for better or for worse. Being at peace means we accept that we cannot undo the past, but we should remember it to always be moving forward.

If what distinguishes us from other living beings is our level of consciousness and ability to develop meta-cognitive skills, then we can never re-become blank slates. You literally cannot forget something (although this discussion brings to mind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--great movie). So if we can't forget, where do we go from here?

I would actually hate to forget the lowest points of my life. I need to remember them in order to avoid repeats of past disasters (well, in theory that would work).

I think this year I might make a list in my journal of everything I did that was unacceptable, stupid, and regretful. It will be hilarious and depressing. It will reveal my humanity, it will spell out failure to a certain degree, it will show how I might be slightly unhinged. But it will also show me how far up I can go as long as I remember how low I sometimes fall.

If suffering means the ability to anticipate a loss or a fall, I accept it. Because it also means that I can get back up again as long as I keep believing in my own potential.