The Closest I Will Get To A New Year's Resolution

I have always believed in the adage that the best solution is usually simple, but this is a difficult thing to remember in regard to ourselves. Many of us who analyze ourselves do so out of habit, and thus do so restlessly, ceaselessly, confabulating problems and confabulating solutions and playing a game akin to "throw every idea against the wall to see what sticks". At times I have been stuck too much in a process of analyzing my every changing habit to try to understand its genesis and ultimate destination, but this is a losing battle. We ruin ourselves when we try to wire ourselves for self-improvement but do so in a way that does not respect the rule that the best solution is usually simple. Unfortunately, all this time my unstated creed seems to have been "urgency", rather than "simplicity".

What do I want to accomplish? I want to see the arc of my life in a lucid way, come to terms with it, and proceed by my own design, with the knowledge it affords me (or offends me) with. And, perhaps now I am at a stage where I can see that - through no particular virtue of my own, but rather as a simple arrival at a clearing in the fog that occurs throughout life if we maintain sufficient honesty and patience.

Ten years ago, my life shifted from an external struggle with the world to one resolutely internal, and I have little reason to believe that it will ever shift back again. By the scale of the internal, I am sobered to look back and assess how far I have come in that time. So little has passed before me. I feel that if I have proven anything, it has been that one human has so little chance to change the world. We are at the mercy of the tides.

McCarthy wrote, "In the end we all come to be cured of our sentiments." How true this has been for me. In many stages of my life, I have guarded my precious sentiments dearly, wanting to believe they are eternal. In every case the turning of the world has slowly washed them clean from me. What did a notion like "true love" ever do to me, in the end? Nearly kill me? For what? To believe that I belonged to something? Or to believe that something belonged to me? In the end, it simply engendered new sentiments. My life today is in the notable decline of the echo boom of sentiment from this one initial folly that has reverberated through my emotional life, from then until now. More conclusively, curing me of my sentiments has meant curing me of my personality, a shameful outcome in a world that I once believed I was destined to make a difference in.

What remains for me here? Can I be surprised again? Can I find anything to sustain myself above the sadness that returns so consistently?

I have asked these questions before, certain that the answers were bleak, and yet, in time I was proven so very, very wrong. I hope that it is true again. I want to believe that this place, so defined in my mind by the actions of an inscrutable past, also precedes greater joy to come. I wish for myself that I may outrun the gravity of apathy into a future filled with meaning.