Resolutions we never made

Photo By Zephyris via Wikipedia

Jairo Ramos/ Staff Writer
The “New Year’s Eve” experience seems too predictable now: crowded households, mobs on the television whose voices are overpowered by the sounds of music and champagne fizz, earlier in the afternoon, the women covering their fresh hairdos with their hands and families running out of stores.
What’s most predominant is the mean threat of failure.
In our minds, the failed promises are parts of the atmosphere. We joke about the more stereotypical ones; yet, somewhere inside us, we long for such mechanisms– resolutions that, in the magic of a calendar night, could make us stronger. Nostalgia from another era, perhaps, when we believed that a wish under starlight could have miraculously made us new.
In this endeavor, we have grown used to failing. We have watched so many New Year sunrises –even moved from one millennium to another– without finding our philosopher’s stone in the change of almanac, losing something inside us every time we do, and slowly forgetting, in the process, about the infallibility of our human instinct to change.
Yet, the epicenter of our recurrent and absolute failure lies not in our sense of expectation but in our timing. We trust the first day of January to be our catalyst, the immediate, epiphanic proof that we can be more committed versions of ourselves, new and clever enough to benefit from the fireworks left behind a calendar lapse.
We’re wrong. The source we look for, though we often miss it, doesn’t come to us until the fourth or fifth day of the year, once we’re back to the old tablecloth and stained silverware, and we begin to inhale the Sunday feeling that tells us that life has disappointed us, or that we have disappointed ourselves once more. It is not until the relatives are gone, and the voids inside us begin to make their way through our desperate fingers, that we start to realize that change doesn’t fly on-call; it doesn’t materialize when invited. That inspiration and invigoration tend to wane before their products show their first leaves.
This thought, is the basis for our progress. Because when the claws of our dreaded routines are too close to escape from, and all we have left is the memory of those days we spent apart from it, we remember what the whole run-up to New Year’s Eve itself is about: remembering. Reminiscing through videos, and late night talks about precious days gone by that, at the time, seemed like parts of the routine themselves.
Eventually, we come to the immensely beautiful realization that our happiest and saddest moments all come in the form of an engagement to a continuous and continually deferring stream of memories– a series of nostalgic, conscious trips to the past, and through the past, which simultaneously form a part of each other, and through which we unconsciously witness our enormous potential to change over time.
Like this, we start making sense of things. We contemplate the marvel of our ability to evolve, and the promise in every Wednesday-night microwave dinner, in every stroll through the university– understanding that even the most silent of our moments are never dull. Never in vain.
The last of the Christmas lights have been taken down from buildings by the time the bang of the garbage disposal on a Monday afternoon takes us back to the pop of a champagne cork, to a firework. The gap between them is now a vision of life, Ginsberg and Cézenna’s Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus.

The contrast turns into a testament to advancement, whilst we, mad, become the resolutions we never made.