It’s only January 9th, so chances are you’re still going strong on those New Years resolutions, hitting the treadmill after the straggler holiday parties, passing the candy dish at work without even glancing down. I mean, I know I am. Last night they even had to kick me out of the gym (ok, ok, I just didn’t know they closed early on Sundays).
Except that going to the gym wasn’t a New Years resolution but a habit I started on my last gig. And the drinking less, eating as many vegetables as I can cram into each meal (that tray of Christmas cookies was a special case) aren’t because I read them in a book but because… well… I feel better.
Sure, I made my resolutions, as people do, only this year they seem less like goals and more like choices; less a list of things to coerce and bribe and batter myself into doing (or not doing) and more just a handful of descriptives about the way I’d like life to be. There are still goals among them, to be sure (Broadway! I am coming for you) but at the same time an ease, a moment to remember the sun is shining, you know, I live two blocks from Broadway and it will be there tomorrow and it will be there next year and there are so many interesting stories to tell and waiting, eager audiences.
And I’ve been thinking about this very human desire to re-invent ourselves, to create the next new improved version, Katie 2012.0. We get a new hairstyle, trendier clothes, we change our name and move to a new town, we outrun and outfox and outdo our old selves and then we tell the stories of how fleeting is popularity, how transitory is success, how we can never escape our past until we turn and face it head-on.
And I’ve been there, too, which is why I’m taking paragraphs to say: this is different. This is new, in that taste-them-again-for-the-first-time kind of way. This year it’s less a re-invention, revision, fixer-upper self-help session and more… okay, I’ll leave it to the poets:
“A New Story of Your Life”
by Michael Blumenthal
Say you finally invented a new story
of your life. It is not the story of your defeat
or of your impotence and powerlessness
before the large forces of wind and accident.
It is not the sad story of your mother’s death
or of your abandoned childhood. It is not,
even, a story that will win you the deep
initial sympathies of the benevolent goddesses
or the care of the generous, but it is a story
that requires of you a large thrust
into the difficult life, a sense of plenitude
entirely your own. Whatever the story is,
it goes as it goes, and there are vicissitudes
in it, gardens that need to be planted,
skills sown, the long hard labors
of prose and enduring love. Deep down
in some long-encumbered self,
it is the story you have been writing
all of your life, where no Calypso holds you
against your own willfulness,
where you can rise
from the bleak island of your old story
and tread your way home.
