Resolute

 

A random shot of the fire of a smelting furnace - fire is always an appropriate image!

 

Another year has passed. Everything has changed, everything has stayed the same. I've never been one for new year's celebrations, let alone resolutions. Just the other day I was telling the story of being invited to a friend's for New Year's as a kid. I was a bit confused by the vibrancy of their plans. Sure, we recognized it was New Year's in my house, sometimes we'd even stay up until midnight and toast each other with gingerale (or whatever they were drinking that was age appropriate.) A party, fireworks, outdoor raucous ramblings, running around yelling ...it all seemed a bit much. I've always preferred a quieter observance, I guess, for most things. I do understand the impulse to celebrate things – anything and everything can be cause for celebration, and it should be. I've come to understand that sometimes we truly need celebration – particularly wild, ecstatic celebration. It is part of the human condition.

I most certainly understand the impulse to start fresh, to try to improve, to strive to do better … I've always done that, but I tend to do it a lot more regularly – every day, or whenever I'm faced with beginning or ending or failure. To have it as a New Year's thing just never felt right to me, and so, thinking ahead to what I want to try to do in the coming months my choices feel a little disingenuous to me, but a friend has been posting about goals they set last year and goals they are setting for the coming year, and it made me think about things a little differently. The idea of 52 for 52 presented itself to me – 52 undertakings in various areas throughout the year, one each week. The idea appealed as a good way to try to nurture discipline in some of the things I'm trying to work on.

Definitions of the word resolute vary – the various dictionaries don't want to be identical, after all...but they all boil down to the same thing. Merriam-Webster online sums it up nicely as “marked by firm determination.” I like the feel of that, and I've decided that against all my own misgivings, that is what I choose for this year, I choose to be resolute, to be marked by firm determination. Not just in my undertaking of doing certain things on a weekly basis or better, but in my outlook for the year, in my attitude and my actions I will aim to be resolute. And I will celebrate, albeit quietly. I will celebrate anything, and, I hope, everything. Maybe somewhere in there I will find an occasion that demands wild and ecstatic celebration, and if I give in to the impulse my celebrations will be markedly determined.